PayTM Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma Presses For Government Regulation On Google In India

Going all out in its pushback against Google's tech hegemony, Indian digital payments platform PayTM's founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma has asserted that Government needs to regulate the United States (US) based technology behemoth's operations in India, reports Livemint.

Sharma has stressed that Google and Facebook together take close to 50 per cent of a technology startup's investments and almost control the balance sheets through advertisement spends and payment commissions. He also said that it was because of Google and Facebook's duopoly that not a significant investment has been made into 'Digital India' given these companies consume most of a startup's funding.

While asserting that Indian startups don't have an alternative, Sharma emphasised that Google's policies are arbitrary and the deployment of the same is even more arbitrary. He further added that there is not even a court which Indian companies can go to. He said, "Google is a ruler of India's technology business, as 95 per cent of customers use Google's Play Store in India."

It should be noted that many startup founders including Sharma have been in discussions with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to stop Google's domination over the nation's technology landscape.