An overview of Google's efforts to scale its business in India, where falling data prices and rising smartphone penetration have opened up big new opportunities
Context & Ripple Effects
This Fortune overview lands mid-arc in Google's decade-long India bet. The company's institutional footprint there began with Google Capital's first international expansion, and its 'next billion users' playbook was already being road-tested in Indonesia under the Next One Billion Project before India became the flagship.
What changed by this point is that cheap mobile data and rising smartphone penetration turned India from a frontier experiment into a core growth market — setting up the later moves in the corpus: a $700M equity stake in Bharti Airtel and, after regulatory pressure, third-party billing for games in India.
First-order effects
- Millions of first-time internet users come online through Android devices and Google services, expanding the audience for Search, YouTube, and ads at exactly the moment mature markets' growth slows.
Second-order effects
- Telecom operators become strategic gatekeepers rather than mere carriers — the Airtel investment shows Google paying for distribution as data prices fall and carrier relationships decide who reaches new subscribers.
Third-order effects
- India becomes the template where platform economics get renegotiated: the antitrust-driven shift to third-party billing signals that scale in next-billion markets comes bundled with regulatory scrutiny of app-store take rates.
The trend: US platforms are shifting from exporting products to emerging markets toward buying structural positions in them — equity stakes, carrier partnerships, and localized offerings — as user growth concentrates outside the West.