Indonesia should compete for its own search box

Jakarta, Indonesia — August 14, 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.

About the Author

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.