The Google bargain

GOOGLE’S new local office gave the government a week to celebrate. It was inaugurated at the Prime Minister’s House, where Pakistan and Google signed an MoU three days later. Pakistani students will receive free access to Google AI Plus and Gemini for a year, while Google is targeting 150, 000 career certificates in 2026. The two sides will cooperate on an AI Centre of Excellence in Islamabad. These commitments build on a Chromebook assembly line launched with local partners in Haripur in 2025. Google. org has also committed $500, 000 to Digital Pasban, which aims to reach 200, 000 households with Urdu safety material and workshops. This is welcome. International technology companies can create jobs, train people and support local developers. But the important question is how this relationship will take shape. The agreement also mentions AI analytics for the Federal Board of Revenue, agriculture, digital payments, and public services. These are no longer workshops or subscriptions. They reach into state machinery and involve data about how citizens earn, spend, own property, and interact with government. This is where celebration must give way to policy. The government should assess this partnership against five questions: whether it builds national capacity, offers fair economic terms, keeps public data under Pakistani control, protects critical datasets, and guarantees citizens enforceable privacy rights. The government should assess the partnership with Google against five questions. The first is whether free access builds capacity or dependence. A year of Gemini may teach students to use an AI tool, but it will not give universities shared GPU clusters, enable local firms to host sensitive workloads, or help researchers build models around Pakistani languages. Chromebook assembly may create jobs, but it is not necessarily technology transfer. The government should ask what capabilities Pakistani firms will acquire and how much value will remain here. The second question concerns the economic bargain. Google and Meta take a dominant share of Pakistan’s digital advertising market, with one estimate placing their combined share above 85 per cent. Local publishers and advertising firms are left competing for a much smaller share. Pakistan enacted a 5pc tax on the gross proceeds of certain foreign digital suppliers in 2025. Google was reportedly told that its local presence placed it outside the tax. The government later withdrew the tax for all covered foreign suppliers following objections from American business groups. A punitive tax would be self-defeating, but Pakistan is a large market and should negotiate accordingly. Local presence should bring fair taxation, skilled employment, local procurement, technology transfer, and reinvestment. An office and training targets cannot substitute for an equitable economic bargain. The third question is who controls public data and benefits from it. There is no public evidence that Google has received Pakistani government datasets. Its standard Cloud terms state that customer data will not be used to train or fine-tune AI models without prior permission. That is reassuring, but it does not tell us what safeguards govern this partnership. The government has published summaries of the MoU, but not its full text, and has not explained what data may be shared, where it will be stored, who may access it, or whether it may be used to improve a model. These conditions cannot be left to private contracts beyond public scrutiny. Data produced by Pakistani citizens and institutions is a national asset. Giving a global company access without clear limits could allow value created in Pakistan to strengthen systems owned elsewhere, while Pakistan remains their customer. There is an uncomfortable historical analogy here. The East India Company entered South Asia as a commercial enterprise, but gradually extracted the region’s resources and accumulated power over its markets. Big Tech companies do not govern territory, but their business model can produce a modern form of extraction. They take revenue, attention, and data from large populations, use them to strengthen systems owned elsewhere, and often return little in the form of local infrastructure or technological ownership. Pakistan should welcome investment, but it should not mistake access to foreign technology for control over its own digital future. The fourth question concerns critical information. Criminal records, tax histories, biometric information, law-enforcement databases and defence-related material cannot be treated like ordinary data. Google Public Sector received a contract with a ceiling of $200 million from the US Department of Defence in 2025. The Pentagon has since announced agreements to deploy AI developed by Google and other companies on classified networks. This does not mean that Google will misuse Pakistani data, but dependence on a company integrated into another country’s defence infrastructure raises national security questions. Access to critical datasets should be restricted by law and subject to independent security review, strict controls and clear rules on storage and deletion. More broadly, Pakistan should avoid becoming overly reliant on foreign systems. The fifth question is whether Pakistanis will have enforceable rights over their information. Pakistan still has no comprehensive personal data protection statute in force. A credible law must bind companies and the state, establish an independent regulator, require purpose limitation and data minimisation, and provide remedies. Meta’s €1. 2 billion European privacy penalty over transfers of user data to the US shows why enforcement matters. Such a law should also draw on Helen Nissenbaum’s theory of contextual integrity, which holds that privacy depends on whether information flows are appropriate to the context in which the data was provided. Tax data should not become AI training material, and a police complaint should not feed an unrelated predictive tool without clear legal authority and safeguards. Google’s presence can be valuable, but one company cannot revolutionise Pakistan’s digital economy. Nor can borrowed infrastructure provide the independence on which a genuine digital economy must rest. The government should publish the MoU, disclose Google’s tax treatment and protect sensitive datasets through law and auditable contracts. At the same time, Pakistan must invest in power, sovereign compute, local data centres, Pakistani language models, universities and public digital infrastructure. Google can contribute to that ecosystem, but it cannot become the ecosystem. Otherwise, Pakistan will gain access to the future while ensuring that someone else continues to own it. The writer is the founder of Media Matters for Democracy. Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2026

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