Google CEO Larry Page finally speaks again, calls regulation 'a big risk' (video)

Google chief executive and co-founder Larry Page is back in the public eye for the first time since June, after spending several months to recover from a vocal cord injury.

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Page’s voice is still raspy, and it looks like he has to speak in a fairly controlled way, but he was recovered enough to take the main stage at the company’s Zeitgeist Americas conference in Arizona on Tuesday (see the full interview below), AllThingsD reports.

Perhaps because he had to make a bit more effort to speak, Page was surprisingly revealing about a variety of topics. On government regulation, he was hopeful that Google could work together with antitrust regulators. Earlier this week, we reported that the FTC may be leaning towards taking action against Google over its search dominance, following a year-long investigation.

“I do think over-regulation of the Internet and restriction of what people can do is a big risk for us,” Page said last night.

He also defended Google’s new unified privacy policy from critics: “Virtually everything that we want to do, I think, is somewhat at odds with locking down all your information for uses that you haven’t contemplated yet. We don’t actually know how the Internet is going to work 10 years from now. So I think it’s a mistake to start carving out large classes of things that you don’t really understand yet, that you don’t want people to do.”

Page pointed to Google Now, the company’s new voice search/personal assistant in Android that’s smart enough to learn your behavior, as something the company couldn’t offer without tying its privacy policies together. He added that there are plenty of things we do today that we’ll be able to automate through something like Google Now.

He said nothing new when it came to the Apple Maps controversy, saying that Google will likely release its own iOS map app soon. But Page also saw criticism over Apple’s Maps as validation for Google’s hard work in the field.

Page also noted that innovating in hardware and software is easier now, compared to before the rise of smartphones. With Google Glass, the company’s geeky augmented reality glasses, he said “every time I use it I feel like I’m living in the future.”

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