Google’s Larry Page: “I Think the Government’s Likely to Collapse Under Its Own Weight.”

Over the weekend, Google co-founders Sergey Brin
and Larry Page sat down for a rare joint
public interview with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, in
which the three billionaires reminisced about how Brin and Page
nearly sold their groundbreaking search technology to Excite for
$1.6 million in 1999 (Google’s market capitalization is now $392.7
billion), speculated on how self-driving cars could change the way
we live (there are “policy risks,” said Brin), and discussed how
Google rewrote the rules on mission creep (“ideally, the company
would scale the number of things it does with the number of people
in a linear fashion,” said Page).

But why isn’t the company devoting more of its innovation
firepower to the wildly inefficient U.S. health care industry,
which hogs about 18% of GDP? Brin explained:

Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It’s just a
painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to
spend my time. Even though we do have some health projects, and
we’ll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory
burden in the U.S. is so high that think it would dissuade a lot of
entrepreneurs.

Page echoed Brin, and then speculated that if researchers were
allowed to anonymously mine medical records “I imagine that would
save 10,000 lives in the first year.” That can’t happen, noted
Page, because of rules imposed by the 1996 federal Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Later in the interview, an audience member asked the co-founders
if government makes it more difficult for them to engage in
long-term planning. Page responded by offering some perspective on
how regulation that “increases without bounds” is likely to lead
government “to collapse under its own weight:”

I was trying to reduce the complexity in Google. I was thinking,
“We’re getting to be a bigger company. Let’s take our rules and
regulations. Let’s make sure they stay at 50 pages, so people can
actually read it.” But the problem that I discovered about that was
that by reference, we include the entire law and regulation of the
entire world, because we’re a multinational company. We operate
everywhere. Our employees, what they do affects everything. In some
sense, we’d have to read the hundred million pages of law and
regulation that are out there.

The entire interview is below. A transcript is
here.