Larry Page on Regulation, Maps and Google\'s Social Mission

Google welcomes regulatory scrutiny but is worried that too much regulation could hurt its business and the prospects for Internet innovation, Larry Page, Google's chief executive, said Tuesday.

Mr. Page, speaking publicly for the first time since Google said in June that he had lost his voice and would avoid public appearances, was at Google's annual Zeitgeist conference for advertisers and partners in Paradise Valley, Ariz. His voice sounded weak. “I'm still a little hoarse, but I'm here and I'm happy about that,” he said.

Mr. Page responded to questions about investigations by regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission, into both privacy violations and whether Google violates antitrust rules by favoring its own services over others.

“We've had a pretty good debate with the regulators, we've taken an approach to work with them,” Mr. Page said. “I think that's been working, and you know, I'm hopeful that will continue to work well.”< /p>

“I do think overregulation of the Internet and restriction of what people can do is a big risk for us,” he said.

“We don't actually know how the Internet's going to work 10 years from now, so it's kind of, I think, a mistake to start carving out large classes of things that you don't really understand yet,” Mr. Page said. “That's kind of the approach a lot of regulators are taking, which I think is sad.”

It is essential for Google's core business, search, for it to enter some of its customers' businesses, he said, including maps, local search and comparison shopping.

“If you type ‘Sony digital camera,' do you want a list of links to other search engines?” Mr. Page said. “I don't think that's really right. You probably want product information, you want to buy something. So our job is to serve users, to serve all of you, and to do a really good job doing that, and a lot of times that requires us really answering the question and und erstanding deeply the underlying information.”

Mr. Page spoke at a resort in the shadow of Camelback Mountain, along with speakers like Sean Penn, the celebrity economist Austan Goolsbee, the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and Bill Clinton, who joined virtually via Google Plus Hangout.

Mr. Page addressed other controversial issues for Google, including the recent uproar over maps after Apple removed Google's maps from the iPhone and replaced them with its own version, which many people said was inferior.

He did not say when Google would release a maps app for the iPhone, but subtly goaded Apple when he said, “We're excited that other people have started to notice that we've worked hard on that for seven years.”

Mr. Page also spent a lot of time talking about Google's social mission, beyond making money, a new theme for him to discuss publicly as chief executive. He said it affects everything from YouTube's controversial decision to selectively block the anti-Islam video that provoked riots to Google's generous employee benefits.

“We have somewhat of a social mission, and most other companies do not,” Mr. Page said. “I think that's why people like working for us, and using our services.”

Companies' goals, he said, should be to make their employees so wealthy that they do not need to work, but choose to because they believe in the company.

“My grandfather was an auto worker, and I still have a lead hammer that he would carry to work everyday to protect himself from the company that he worked for,” Mr. Page said.

“Hopefully, I believe in a world of abundance, and in that world, many of our employees don't have to work, they're pretty wealthy, they could probably go years without working,” he said. “Why are they working? They're working because they like doing something, they believe in what they're doing.”