Google just says no to shareholders’ anti-evil proposals
Can it be true? Google, a company that says it “does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains”, is opposing proposals put forward by Google shareholders that seek to establish policies against Internet censorship and create a new board committee on human rights, according to its proxy filed Tuesday afternoon.
The proposal regarding censorship is offered by New York City’s comptroller on behalf of pensions for various city employees. The proposal’s preamble begins “Whereas, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are fundamental human rights, and free use of the Internet is protected in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom to ‘receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers’ .”
It cites efforts by “authoritarian foreign governments such as the Governments of Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam” to “block, restrict, and monitor the information their citizens attempt to obtain”; and notes that “technology companies in the United States have failed to develop adequate standards by which they can conduct business with authoritarian governments while protecting human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression.”
The proposal calls for the following steps:
- Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet
- restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.
- The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.
- The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
- Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding
- government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.
- Users should be informed about the company’s data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.
- The company will document all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.
Another proposal put forward by Harrington Investments, a so-called “socially responsible” investment firm, calls for amending Google’s by-laws to include a new board committee that “would review and make policy recommendations regarding human rights issues raised by the company’s activities and policies.” In defining “”human rights,” the proposal suggest that the committee could use the US Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as “nonbinding benchmark or reference documents.”
Google’s board recommends voting against both proposals without a single word of comment. So much for principles.
