Google Co-Founders on Industry Regulation and Innovation

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page gave a big interview to venture capitalist Vinod Hosle at the last annual Khosla Ventures summit, and a video of this interview appeared last week on YouTube, writes TechCrunch.

The interview touched upon very different issues - from machine learning to the changing environment in the labor market, from new opportunities for health technologies to their 16-year history of relationships as co-founders. You can watch the entire 42-minute conversation in the video above, there is also a text transcript.
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Particularly interesting were their thoughts about the future of health care, given the recent steps taken by Google in this area. Approximately 29 minutes in the video above, Khosla asks: “Can you imagine Google becoming a medical company? This area may be more than a search business or a media business. ”

Obviously, both Bryn and Paige are very interested in medicine and health, but they are repelled by the current obstacles to legal regulation in the United States. Brin answered:

“I think this is certainly a bigger business, and we have [products, such as] contact lenses that track glucose levels ... but overall, health care is so hard regulated, it's just a painful business. This is not how I would spend my time. Although we have several projects in the field of health, we will deal with them to a certain extent. But I think the burden of regulation in the United States is so high that it discourages many entrepreneurs. ”

Page continued:

“... I am very enthusiastic about the possibilities of data, including improving health, but this, I think, as Sergey said, is so hard regulated, this is a difficult area.

I can give you an example: Imagine if you had the opportunity to search for medical records of people in the United States, and any medical researcher could do that. Perhaps with the removal of names. And maybe when a medical researcher searches for your data, you can see what he was looking for and why. I believe that this would save 10,000 lives in the first year, only that. It is almost impossible to do because of the Health Insurance Act. So I’m afraid that we’ve over-regulated ourselves and taken away from some really great data mining opportunities. "

Later, in the 37th minute, Page shared similar thoughts about how complex laws affect the effectiveness of governments and corporations:

“I’m afraid that when I look at governments, our interaction with governments ... it becomes rather illogical.
... The complexity of the government increases over time. If you just look at all our democracies in the world, the volume of regulation and the laws that we have is growing indefinitely ...

One thing I propose is that I spoke with some state leaders, actually with the president of South Korea, and I told her: “Why don't you just restrict all laws and regulations to a certain amount of pages. And when you add one page, you have to remove the other “. And she actually wrote it, it's cool. I think that otherwise the state is likely to simply fall apart under its own weight, despite good people and good intentions. Just because of this growing issue. I just do not think this is reasonable.

When [Google] became a public company, the laws were 60 years old. If you take a random law professor, lock him in a room and say to rewrite them, then something would turn out much better. But we are not doing this. ”

Given the amount of time they spent thinking about such topics, it will be interesting to see whether Bryn and Page will be changing how things work at the regulatory level in the future.