Google to comply with India’s IT rules, CEO Sundar Pichai says

BENGALURU — Google is com­mit­ted to com­ply­ing with Indi­a’s revised IT rules that came into effect Wednes­day, Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer Sun­dar Pichai said on Thurs­day.

“It’s obvi­ous­ly ear­ly days and our local teams are very engaged. You know we com­ply with local laws and we will approach it with the same frame­work,” Pichai said in a video con­fer­ence with select reporters from Asia Pacif­ic.

“We engage and explain to every­one the impor­tance of infor­ma­tion, pro­mot­ing (the) free flow of infor­ma­tion, but do want to respect leg­isla­tive process­es in demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­tries.”

“We are com­mit­ted to com­ply­ing (with the laws). And to the extent there are requests (for infor­ma­tion on users) we com­ply with and we will include that in our trans­paren­cy reports. It is a frame­work with which we will oper­ate it around the world,” the India-born exec­u­tive said.

India on Wednes­day sent a mis­sive to inter­net and social media inter­me­di­ary com­pa­nies ask­ing them to update the gov­ern­ment whether they have com­plied with the reg­u­la­tions.

The new reg­u­la­tions man­date inter­net and social media com­pa­nies with over five mil­lion users in India to have local griev­ance offi­cers, chief com­pli­ance offi­cer and a nodal con­tact per­son, whose details along with a phys­i­cal con­tact address are pub­lished on their web­site.

The rules also man­date trace­abil­i­ty of the orig­i­na­tor of mes­sages, along with a pro­vi­sion for vol­un­tary ver­i­fi­ca­tion as a means to estab­lish user iden­ti­ty.

“We respect the sov­er­eign­ty of coun­tries and the leg­isla­tive process­es. We work hard to adapt and func­tion and where we need to push back, we do that. It is a bal­ance we have stuck around the world. India is a vibrant place where we are able to pro­vide a lot of infor­ma­tion across a lot of our prod­ucts and so will oper­ate with that frame­work,” Pichai said.

On Tueas­day, What­sApp filed a case in the Del­hi High Court against the new guide­lines that also man­date social media plat­forms to trace the ori­gin of spe­cif­ic mes­sages.

The Face­book-owned com­pa­ny has argued that the new rules vio­late the fun­da­men­tal right to pri­va­cy of users.

The gov­ern­ment has shot back say­ing WhatsApp’s attempt to por­tray the inter­me­di­ary guide­lines of India as con­trary to the right to pri­va­cy is mis­guid­ed.

Pichai said the issue of reg­u­la­tion of tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies by coun­tries glob­al­ly is “evolv­ing”.

“It’s an evolv­ing land­scape. Tech is touch­ing soci­ety, you know, in more deep­er and broad­er ways and the pace of change is fast. We ful­ly expect gov­ern­ments, right­ful­ly, to both scru­ti­nize and adopt reg­u­la­to­ry frame­works, (whether) it’s Europe copy­right direc­tive or India with infor­ma­tion reg­u­la­tion,” he said.

“We see it as a nat­ur­al part of soci­eties fig­ur­ing out how to gov­ern and adapt them­selves in this tech­nol­o­gy world. As a com­pa­ny, we are very clear about the val­ues of free and open inter­net and its ben­e­fits.” — (AGENCY)