Indonesia should compete for its own search box

Jakarta, Indonesia — August 11, 2026 By Dr. Edwin Hidayat Abdullah —  A
few months ago I argued in these pages that Indonesia should judge
its digital economy by the value it keeps, not the traffic it
generates, and I set out six capabilities that decide whether it
stays. This is where the whole argument stands or falls. Almost every
one of our 280m people reaches the internet through the same small
box. About 95% of searches in Indonesia go through Google. Nine in
ten of our phones run on Android. More than eight in ten of us browse
on Chrome. The door, the hallway and the key all belong to one
foreign company, and we notice this about as often as we notice the
air.

People
assume a firm this large simply built something better, and in places
it did. But a lead this complete is not won once and then kept on
merit. It is maintained. Rival apps are kept off Android phones
before anyone can form a habit. Changing your default search engine
is made just tiresome enough that most people never bother, and the
default, not our preference, is what we end up using. Vast sums are
paid every year to stay the default on a rival maker’s devices as
well. No single trick decides anything. Together they mean that from
the moment you switch on a new phone, the choice has quietly been
made for you.

The
bill for this arrives without a sound. Alphabet took in about $402bn
in its last financial year, roughly a quarter of everything Indonesia
produces, and most of that is advertising sold beside search results.
Of it, somewhere between $3bn and $6bn is spent by Indonesian
businesses every year, and almost all of it boards a plane. It is
worth naming plainly: this is not a data-privacy footnote but a leak
in the hull, and one that widens a little each time another
Indonesian comes online.

Here
is where readers of this newspaper reach for the word protectionism,
and they are right to. ‘Digital sovereignty’ is often a polite
name for a wall, and walls tend to make a few people rich while
everyone else pays more for less. So let me say plainly what we are
not proposing. Not to ban Google. Not a tariff in fancy dress. Not a
hand-picked champion crowned by decree. We want to open the market,
not shut it. Indonesians are not wrong to like Google. They have
simply never been given a real chance to try anything else.

What
moves these markets turns out to be dull, and regulatory. In 2016
Russia’s competition authority made Google give up its default
place on Android phones; its share of mobile search fell from around
60% toward a third, and a local rival grew into the gap. Korea went
harder in 2021, banning the tying of payment systems and auditing
preinstalled apps every year. Its own search engine held on, online
advertising became far cheaper than in Japan, and Korean e-commerce
pulled ahead of Japan’s over the years that followed. Europe’s
Digital Markets Act, which forced open the app stores and required a
choice screen, is reckoned to have added tens of billions of euros in
value. The instruments themselves are unglamorous. A choice screen
with the options shuffled so no one gets the best seat. A ban on
locked defaults and on bundling. The right to carry your search
history with you when you leave. They read like paperwork. They move
markets.

Let
me be careful about the aim, because it is the easiest thing to get
wrong. We are not trying to swap a dependence on Google for a
dependence on somebody else’s Google. A foreign partner can be a
way to acquire skills we do not yet have, on terms we write and can
audit, but it cannot become the new landlord. What matters sits
behind the open door: a national search index that anyone can build
on, advertising and cloud run from inside the country, and engineers
whose pay is taxed here rather than there.

Artificial
intelligence raises every stake at once. The systems that will soon
answer a question outright, rather than hand you ten blue links, are
trained on search queries and indexed text. A country that cannot
search for itself may soon find that it cannot answer for itself
either, and that it is being explained to its own citizens by a model
that barely hears their languages. A national search engine is
therefore not nostalgia for a homegrown alternative. It is the ground
floor of any artificial intelligence that thinks in Indonesian, and
in Javanese, Sundanese, Batak and the rest.

There
is a blunter economic case too. Indonesia spends roughly six units of
investment to win one more unit of output; our neighbours manage on
about four. Capital simply works less hard here than next door.
Singapore, meanwhile, captures nearly three times the regional
data-centre revenue that we do, with a thirtieth of our population.
That is not fate; it is policy. Cheaper advertising, cheaper cloud
and quicker digitisation are among the least glamorous ways to fix
that, and they reach the workshop and the roadside stall, not only
the app that venture capital happens to like. Lower the cost of
finding a customer, and every business that sells online, the small
ones above all, is given room to breathe.

We
have attempted the noble version of this before, and failed. In 2004
five ministries announced a national move to open-source software. It
produced some perfectly serviceable systems and almost no users,
because it asked politely instead of requiring, spread ownership so
thin that no one could be held to account, and pushed supply while
forgetting demand. Trading one supplier for another, with nobody
minding the governance, bought us no sovereignty at all. Repeat that
and we will earn the same result.

So
this time the design has to be harder on itself. It requires a single
owner with a binding mandate, and a binding audit to go with it: real
money committed over several years, published results, and a
government willing to use the national tools first rather than wait
for everyone else. The gravest risk here is not Google. It is that
this owner becomes a captured monopolist and we spend a decade
trading Mountain View for Jakarta. The rules must apply as ruthlessly
to the national champion as they do to the foreigner, and the day
they do not is the day this policy has failed, whatever its market
share happens to be.

Indonesia
will grow whatever we decide. The one choice truly in our hands is
narrow: whether the wealth made at the country’s busiest doorway
stays on these islands, in these firms and these households, or
merely passes through on its way somewhere else. For now the door
stands wide open, and it opens onto someone else’s house.
Competition is how we build our own, and start answering the door
ourselves.

Dr. Edwin Hidayat Abdullah is an Indonesian technocrat and public-sector leader currently serving as Director General of Digital Ecosystem at the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia, where he plays a key role in advancing Indonesia’s digital economy, technology innovation, and digital ecosystem development. With extensive experience spanning government, state-owned enterprises, finance, and strategic management, he previously held senior leadership positions including Deputy Minister for State-Owned Enterprises and executive roles within Indonesia’s aviation and tourism sectors. He holds a degree in Economics from Universitas Gadjah Mada and a Master of Public Management through the Lee Kuan Yew Fellowship at the National University of Singapore, with academic exposure at Harvard University and MIT Sloan School of Management. His work focuses on strengthening Indonesia’s digital competitiveness, fostering responsible technology adoption, and building collaborative digital ecosystems involving government, industry, academia, and international partners.