Getting regulatory balance right important for India: Sundar Pichai

At a time when India has placed a renewed version of the data protection bill on the table sparking a fresh discourse on the subject across industry circles, Sundar Pichai, the India born CEO of Google and Alphabet has supported the case for aiding the unabated growth of technology with a dose of “responsible” regulations. “The scale at which tech is working and is touching the lives of people around the world, to me it makes sense that tech needs responsible regulations. It’s important for countries to think about how best to safeguard its citizens, be it privacy, be it security and so it’s an important phase. We are engaging constructively,” Pichai said while elaborating on the company’s views on India’s tech regulations at the annual Google for India event which was held with much fanfare in New Delhi on Monday.

The unchecked rise of global big tech firms and their dominance on the internet have nudged countries across the world to draft rules and norms primarily aimed at making companies accountable for their actions. In its latest draft of the data protection bill, India has eased the data storage norms for companies which is expected to benefit global majors like Google and Meta. The bill is expected to allow transfer and storage of data in “trusted geographies.”

“India has a leadership role to play here given the scale and the technology leadership it will have. It’s important to make sure you are balancing putting in safeguards for people, you are creating framework so that companies can innovate on top of a certainty in the legal framework. But through it all hopefully, India will also be a big export economy..will benefit from an open and connected internet and getting that balance right will be important,” Pichai said.

Pichai, who dampened expectations of the packed audience which was hoping for some clarity from the CEO on reports indicating Google’s move to consider production of Pixel smartphone lineup to India, said that the make in India trend will only grow. “We saw the opportunity on top of UPI..we built Google Pay in India based on the UPI stack and now we are bringing that to other countries around the world. We used AI technology to develop flood forecasting for India and later Bangladesh. Now, we are bringing to many more countries around the world. So, you will see this trend grow over time. With the scale of the market here, being able to find a solution and in many cases in India you can leapfrog and get to the next solution faster. It will be a big incentive for us to be able to do it here and then take it to other countries which sometimes are slower to go through these phases. I see this trend increasing over time,” said the CEO.

All the buzz aside, Pichai’s India visit comes at a time when Google has come under heavy scrutiny from the Competition Commission of India (CCI). In October, the CCI imposed two hefty penalties on Google for allegedly abusing its dominant market position with respect to android mobile devices and its Play store policies.

Pichai said he is bullish on India’s burgeoning startup ecosystem. To me, the reason startups are successful is they built something, they have access to a 300 million plus markets…it is easy to build something that scales across the entire country..this hasn’t always been true in places like Europe or..because you have to scale across 26 markets..and it’s tough for a startup to get that scale. That’s the opportunity India has…how do you make sure that a startup can easily scale across the entirety of the Indian market,” Pichai said. Pichai believes that there is no better time to start-up than the current moment even though businesses are navigating a macroeconomic crisis. “Companies like Google were created in moments of a downturn. So I am very bullish about it over time,” the CEO said.