Google Shareholders Reject Censorship Proposal

prostoalex writes "At the annual shareholder meeting, Google put forth for voting a proposal for the company not to engage in self-censorship, resist by all legal means the demands to censor information, inform the user in case their information was provided to the government, and generally not to store sensitive user data in the countries with below average free speech policies. As this proposal, if passed, would effectively mean the end of Google's China operations, the shareholders rejected the document at the recommendation of the Board of Directors."

Comments

Headline seems totally wrong

[jez9999]

Surely 'Google's shareholders have rejected a NON-censorship proposal'?

Re:And there you have it

[morgan_greywolf]

You might want to consider that this was actually proposed by one of their shareholders

Yeah. A small pension fund with a very few shares. They hardly represent the majority.

That's a nice answer to all those "if a company forgoes profit for doing good, it's a crime against capitalism and shareholders" comments I regularly see on slashdot.

Hmph. I usually see the opposite, but ...

However, this isn't really "doing evil" but rather "not committing do doing good". Google is still free to implement these measures, they are just not forced to do it. From a management perspective, it leaves more options on the table.

But Google won't implement these measures and we all know that. The bottom line is that China is too big a market for Google to ignore. Everyone has to remember that Google is nobody's hero. That's not the reason they exist -- they exist to make money. They reward creativity at Google because ultimately it's profitable to do so. They try to make themselves look less evil than other big companies (AOL, Microsoft, etc.) because they it's profitable to do so. I'm not saying that Google didn't start with admirable goals, but today they are a publicly-traded company and their raison d'etre is to create value for their shareholders. So everyone needs to stop putting companies -- particular Apple and Google -- on a pedestal and realize that your relationship with them as a consumer should be if you like their products, use them, if not, go elsewhere.

What are you talking about?

[REggert]

>>Google lost the ability to "do no evil" the minute they became a publicly traded company.

Your statement is, in fact, utter nonsense.

Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin together possess 66% of the voting power in the company, which is more than enough to shoot down any proposal that the directors (i.e., they) disagree with.

The result of this vote was a decision by the founders, and NOT by random shareholders.

Re:I don't get it.

[flooey]

Am I just naive in thinking that this proposal would have no effect on their Chinese operations? Let's say the Chinese government says "hey Google, play ball" and they say "no". What can the Chinese government do exactly?

First, they can revoke the google.cn name. Country code names are subject to the regulation of the country they're associated with.

Next, they can eliminate all of Google's operations in China. Google has employees and datacenters in China that are completely subject to Chinese law and can be shut down by order of the government.

Third, they can block resolution of google.com and any other Google-related name around the world. This already happens periodically to google.com, that's why they have google.cn, but they could do it completely.

Countries are more than able to control what does and doesn't go on within their borders. China could easily make Google completely inaccessible to its residents.