Sources: in Karan Bhatia's first year as Google's policy lead, he's encouraged relationship building with governments, cut some contract lobbyists, and more
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Google is trying to plug a surge of public scrutiny around the world by overhauling …
Context & Ripple Effects
Karan Bhatia arrived as Google's global public policy lead in 2016 as a former Obama administration adviser, and by February 2019 Google was reorganizing its global lobbying operations, including adding resources to emerging markets to answer regulatory challenges abroad. This report lands at the end of that reorganization's first year: the pivot is now visible in personnel, with contract lobbyists cut in favor of direct relationship building with governments.
The timing matters because the scrutiny is arriving on multiple fronts at once — internal meetings on changing Google's political ad policy were underway the same autumn, and the pressure eventually extended to a law-firm civil rights and racial equity audit years later. Bhatia's job is to convert a reactive lobbying spend into a standing diplomatic function.
First-order effects
- Contract lobbying firms lose Google business as Bhatia cuts some of them, while Google's in-house policy team takes over the direct relationship building with governments that the February 2019 reorganization began staffing, especially in emerging markets.
Second-order effects
- With scrutiny forcing product-level responses like the political ad policy review, Google's shift raises the bar for rivals facing the same regulators, who must decide whether to keep paying for transactional lobbying or match the in-house diplomatic model.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large tech policy operations consolidate around permanent, embedded government-relations functions rather than outsourced contract lobbying — a structure that positions companies like Google to negotiate regulation as an ongoing relationship rather than a series of paid engagements.
The trend: Big tech is replacing transactional contract lobbying with in-house, government-facing diplomacy as regulatory scrutiny spreads across jurisdictions.