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Google's Shareholders Vote Against Human Rights
yo_cruyff notes a Computerworld article on Google's recent annual shareholder meeting, which was dominated by argument over the company's human rights policies. Google's shareholders, on advice from their board, have voted down two proposals on Thursday that would have compelled Google to change its policies. "Google [has been] coming under fire for operating a version of its search engine that complies with China's censorship rules. Google argues that it's better for it to have a presence in the country and to offer people some information, rather than for it not to be active in China at all... [S]hareholders and rights groups including Amnesty International... continue to push Google to improve its policies in countries known for human rights abuses and limits on freedom of speech... Sergey Brin, cofounder and president of technology for Google, abstained from voting on either of the proposals. 'I agreed with the spirit of these proposals,' Brin said. But he said he didn't fully support them as they were written, and so did not want to vote for them."
is a troll.
+5, Informative.
It's hard to think objectively when you have "Google Votes Against Human Rights" as the headline. Did Google vote in favor of genocide or stoning dissidents? No. What they did do was to make a nuanced calculation that I think most reasonable people would agree with. I agree with Google that it is better to provide some information than none. Seriously, what is it going to harm the Chinese government if Google packed up. Google is in a far better position to do good now than if they were completely out of the country. Amnesty and the rest can't see the forest for the trees. Taking a stand in prinicple is just that, in principle with no effect on things in the real world. Pressure Google to use its position in China to lobby for more freedom, don't try and make them leave.
I got a catholic block.
Google's shareholders did not "vote against human rights," they voted against a policy change that was proposed. Even the summary admits that Sergey abstained because he didn't agree with the way the proposals were written, not because he disagreed with the spirit.
Slow news day much?
If you're part of a system, then you're in some way supporting it. Examples of successfully changing a system from within are few and far between and are usually where someone couldn't voluntarily leave the system anyway. Systems are more usually replaced by a competing system. If Google want to change things, they should not submit to China's demands and walk away if need be. That would be a far stronger message and powerful effect than simply agreeing to their terms. I fail to see how they expect to change things through obedience.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Yeah, it's actually quite a shock. Who would have ever guessed that Shareholders would be more concerned with their investments than with changing the domestic policy of a foreign government? That's a total surprise.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Either that or they agree that a little information is better for the chinese people than none at all. I agree with that sentiment, too, yet I feel no burning desire to kill babies or repress people. The best way to change the system is to empower the people, and depriving them of your resources because you'd have to work with an evil government doesn't empower the people at all. Moral stands look good in the paper, but they don't help the people of China at all.
Shareholders and rights groups including Amnesty International... continue to push Google to improve its policies in countries known for human rights abuses and limits on freedom of speech.
The only way that Google can ever have any influence in opening China's information control policies is if Google is actually operating in China. Right now, that means that they must comply with the PRC minimum standards. If the China kicks Google out, then Google's sway in China is reduced to zero. If you really want to be concerned with censorship in China, then you should want Google to gain as much prominence there as possible, and for Google to always be pushing in the right direction. Not making some idealistic stand that alienates them, but being a valued part of China that moves the entire cultural body of China gently towards better human rights.
We are all just people.
In a shareholder meeting, the only question being asked is "Does this raise or lower our income?"
If the answer is "lower," those proposing the idea have to come up with a darn good reason why, or the shareholders get angry, because their stock is going to be worth less than it could be.
China is a big market, and Google wants to expand aggressively into this, so it was a sensible business decision.
Was it a sensible decision in other areas, like ethics or law? The answer to that has to be asked of a higher entity, because it is the pressure of the shareholders' demands that makes Google unable to answer to those areas.
technical writing / development
How can one be critical of Google's business practices in China?
Every time you or I make a decision to buy a product made in China we are voting against human rights.
Why do we support financially a country with such a track record? Because we are either making money doing it, or saving money doing it. Ultimately, we care more about our own pocketbook than the plight of humans elsewhere.
> Either that or they agree that a little information is better for the
> chinese people than none at all.
Your statement assumes that without Google, the people of China would have no
information. This is blatantly incorrect: Google ( 25% market share ) implements the same Government-mandated filters as Baidu ( 62% market share ).
Google's presence in China is simply about gaining a foothold in a potentially
lucrative market. ``Empowering the people'' has nothing to do corporate
strategy.
Even though I am constantly disappointed with what Google has become with regard to it's policies, in this case, I can't fault them.
It's correct that it would have made a stronger point for Google to say it's raw or nothing. It's also easy to sit back with wallet firmly secured and say that THEY should be making that point. I'll bet many of the people faulting Google still purchase products that are in some part made in China or some other country that has similar practices.
In all reality, it is ludicrous to think investors trying to make money , not a point, would vote for something that might keep their for profit corporation from capitalizing on access to an upcoming super power. It's possible, maybe even likely, that China will eventually become larger profit center for Google than the US.
It's not Google's fight. They are in to make money. Period. Do no evil? Please, don't be naive.
And for those of you who say "If you are part of the system, you support it" and criticize Google for not standing up against human right violations, well, then stop buying everything made in China and stand up yourself first! Stop buying Nike shoes, iPods, some GAP cloth, Notebooks, Blu-ray players, LCD TVs and many other gadgets you love so much...Suddenly China's human right violations doesn't sound too much evil when you have to change your consuming habits right?
It's not Google's shareholders, it's ALL of us who "Vote Against Human Rights". We vote with our [insert local currency here] everyday and everyday we vote for the best price/benefit (or any other formula) and care shit about human rights involved in the manufacturing of the product.
I wonder what the computed value of an Ad-Click is in China? Most of the country is dirt poor. Exactly which segments of the Chinese population are being reached by Google?
Clearly the bottom line is the bottom line.
Invenio via vel creo
Your statement assumes that the same results will come through Baidu and Google and that it's the only avenue of information from Google.
First, I don't know whether they have their book search in China yet or any of their other services, but those things could help the Chinese people in their own ways. Giving the Chinese people strong online services isn't a bad thing; I like almost everything that Google's done in the US, the Chinese people might as well.
Second, Baidu's search is different from Google's search unless they're using the same database and algorithms. If Google's indexing more foreign sites, that's probably a good thing. Also, since Google's not based in China, they could easily have more autonomy than Baidu.
Finally, whether it's a play for market share or not, it doesn't change the fact that staying out of China does the Chinese people absolutely no good; unless Google's presence is harming them (and I've seen no evidence even hinting that's the truth), they're doing at least as well as the alternative. Making money doesn't negate any benefits you do along the way.
I'm sure seeing the world as pure black and white and hating corporations for making money is very easy, but you've at least got to admit that there's an argument to be made for Google participating in China without being evil. The fact that they had the vote at all shows that they're considering the human rights side of the equation, and the fact that both of the owners refused to vote makes me think that they're conflicted on the issue.
But they can't give the people anything other the China approved stories.
What happens when China wants Google to misrepresent information?
I say empower the people to get to your uncensored search engine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't know if you could say they are content with their government, seeing as most are probably afraid to stand up to it and others simple don't know if there are better ways to govern the people. I doubt many in the U.S. are content with their government, luckily we have elections, free information and free speech...they have...uhh a censored Google index.
Google is (last I checked) the only search engine that tells you if your search results have been censored.
It's a very small victory, but it's still something the people of China didn't have before.
I also point out that Google tried for years to get the ability to have uncensored searches, they fought, and lost, and while they may not have accomplished much, it wouldn't accomplish anything at all to pull out of China now.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Evil in who's eyes? Robbing shareholders of profits can be seen as evil too. Robbing yourself of market-share in emerging markets can be seen as evil too. Not complying with authorities can even be seen as evil! Sometimes Good can come out of Evil (landing on the moon as a result of WWII) or Evil can come out of Good (bringing freedom and democracy to a country that isn't ready for it resulting in civil conflict).
What people also seem to miss about the whole "don't be evil" thing, is that not being evil does not imply being good. You can be neutral as well. Not evil, not good, just neutral.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
Right. They think that the government have done wonders for their country, and I find little evidence with which to argue.
I'm with Ron Paul on this issue - I don't agree with his negative opinion of China, but I agree with his 'attitude'. I don't agree with his 'desire' to see the government 'collapse' so much as see it change for the better.
If you want to influence another country's future, you need to work from a place of cooperation, not by attempting to bully them.
"Free trade cannot be enforced through threats or by resorting to international protectionist organizations such as the WTO. Even if the Chinese are recalcitrant in opening up their markets, it is not the role of the United States government to lecture the Chinese government on what it should or should not do in its own economy."
Max.
China's strategy of censorship is very hard to actually make work. You're pretty much trying to blacklist all of the internet that doesn't agree with you, and there's a lot of internet out there which cannot be all monitored and sorted. Not to mention it's growing all the time, and then there's that thing about it routing around such attempts.
In Google's position, I don't know what I'd do. It's definitely not the black and white issue the title implies. Still, a few things are certain: Google provides a very powerful way to look up information and ALL information cannot be censored completely. Therefore, it's at least making it easier for people to find stuff - even stuff the government doesn't want them to see.
Robbing the shareholders is different than not maximizing profits.
I might be able to get maximal profits by killing you.
Google is helping to censor and erase the existence of chinese citizens. Yahoo is helping to imprison people for their speech.
Both are giving aid and comfort to an enemy government-- allowing it the benefits of a free society without having to pay the costs of being a free society. Personally, I hope at some point they get nationalized by China or somehow otherwise abused as most totalitarian governments who do not respect the rule of law do to their citizens and business people.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Depends on the investor. I voted in favor of the proposals on my proxy. I'd be curious to see the distribution of votes between individual and institutional shareholders.
Ditto on similar things I've recently seen pass through investment houses like Fidelity. I saw shareholder proposals relating to abstaining from investments that benefit regimes that contribute to genocide (specifically, the Darfur-China issue), and the board statement on the proxies of course said "The board recommends voting against this proposal." Do we "play to win," and damn the cost, or do we play to the best of our ability while having a conscience? I think I know the "business" answer to this.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
Or looked at less cynically, they may be realistic enough to see that Google pulling out of China won't change China's policy, but will give the Chinese people even less access to information. In other words, they figured out that maintaining the moral high ground at the expense of the Chinese citizens didn't do anyone any good.
They may fully value human rights, but disagree on the best way to get there.
The story headline and my headline are essentially equivalent. They're both ridiculous, inflammatory, mischaracterizations of what happened.
I'm sure we all love the election season political advertising that says foolish crap like "Bob Jackass voted NO to making our schools better!"
Well of course he did, because the particular bill in question said something like "50% tax on milk to improve school funding", and Bob thought there were some drawbacks to that approach.
It's not that Google shareholders are against human rights in China. At every public company, a few activist shareholders come up with proposals they want to be voted on that say things like "improve human rights in China" and invariably the board suggests voting against them. I don't think there's some widespread malign for human rights in China. I think there is a real concern that the particulars of the proposal damage or have the potential to damage the business in a way that doesn't offset the hypothetical progress made towards acheiving the aim.
The real story here is that todays proposal of the month got prioritized below some other shareholder objective. Not that Google hates the idea of chinese freedom.
Look at this from Google's perspective. It is in their best interest to make Chinese citizens info-addicts. Google wants to be in the business of making the CHinese people completely dependant on Google for finding out as much as possible. Giving them more possible choices and better filtering/searching technology to whittle the results down to what the PEOPLE want is what will endear google with more customers and a more lucrative eyeballs base to their advertising clients.
The special tricks and procedures Google has to put in place to operate in the Chinese market are a cost of doing business in China, one I'm sure they'd rather dispense with if they thought they could. Some blowhard activist popping up and saying "just don't play ball with the Chinese government" is unrealistic for a variety of reasons.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Unless you're living on the street, you and your kids are eating a bare minimum subsistence diet, you're saving nothing for retirement or for their education, all because you've given every bit of money you have to support the crisis in Darfur or oppose censorship in China... unless you've done all that, you're in the same glass house as the rest of us.
Give the guilt-trip a rest. In the real world, people have to make trade-offs between conflicting but deeply-held principles. Choosing to feed your kids doesn't mean you don't care greatly about the hungry in Africa, or censorship in China. When you have limited resources you have to choose. There's nothing wrong or hypocritical about that.
China's government is not my favorite, but I do not call it an enemy government (anymore). In fact, I think very few governments will actually (dare to) call China's government an enemy in the open. But there is certainly room for improvement with regards to personal freedom and free speech. I can also pretty much understand why China is not pursuing that road (yet).
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
We're all sick of the war, Spanky. But hard as it may be for you to believe, there are still topics out there that have nothing to do with it whasoever.
Here's the full information: A son kills his father after years of abuse, in self defense when his dad was drunk again, beating him close to death's door.
Here's some information: A son kills his father.
Do you see the difference?
Offering some information may give you not only no information, but skewed or twisted information. Which can indeed be worse than none.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is a company and not a person, but its board members, its stockholders, and its employees all share responsibility for its actions and decisions. (From both a moral and a financial point of view.)
Very few of those people--at this I'm guessing, though I think reasonably--are for the kind of blanket censorship that China indulges in. But they also have to deal with the reality of how to get penetration into the Chinese marketplace. Add to that the fact that since it's a large group of people that shares this responsibility, they're working with diffusion of responsibility.
So there isn't one person who says "I'm personally responsible for my company's bad acts," which is unfortunate. Sometimes such a person has to look at himself in the mirror, which can lead to change.
So while I recognize--and I think we all do--that Google's not in a position to strongarm the Chinese government, I also think that professional ethics should not be put aside too easily. We need companies to be--at least a little bit--about building a better future.
Maybe that's just part of the professional ethics you put aside, but it does provoke a question: where do we draw the line? It's a slippery-slope question, of course, but it's also quite real. On the flip-side of the censorship question but still very much on the ethics question, should Google censor criminal sites?
Phishing sites are one obvious example, but how about pyramid schemes? They're illegal in most of the world, and even caused the Albanian economy to collapse a few years back. Or human-slavery: should they censor mail-order-bride sites that are selling human slaves?
Google is a company, and its general purpose is to survive and make profit, as you say. But we don't want profit at any cost: the losses and abuses of human lives (and human minds) are often discounted when they are abstractions, but we should remember--even when we want to thicken our bank accounts--that they are very real.
Thousands are enslaved every day. A River of In
I've always pondered this. It seems that most of the ardent capitalists I know think that profit should always come above the namby-pamby ethical concerns, since corporations are beyond ethics. (which is odd, since they are somewhat legally individuals, and we expect individuals to be ethical) Instead they expect their corporations to follow the law as the ethical minimum. We can see how this often gets blurred into illegal activity with shareholder apathy or encouragement then.
:)
This operates under a very odd assumption, that acting ethically is against profits. It might be true that some potential profits get endangered, but acting ethically doesn't COST money, it just somewhat limits your choices of venue and action, just like the law (which corporations are supposed to follow).
Google, if they chose to stop being in cahoots with China would be doing something ethical. It would cut back on profits, BUT I doubt it would kill them as a company, or actually hurt any shareholders (the positive press involved would probably minimize the the impact). It would be odd to think of such an act as throwing profits away, as well. Since they are doing so EVERYDAY by just obeying the law, and by not doing more drastic things like selling your email addresses to spammers, or doing likewise with all the other terabytes of data on us that they hold. Asking them to do everything possible to maximize profits is irresponsible.
Why should shareholders, and corporations, be above ethical concerns?
Mind, I'm not anti-capitalist, I'm just getting rather sick of the philosophy of "market/shareholders first, responsibility second".
Good job to all the shareholders who voted on this.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
What enemy government? China is not at war with anyone, much less the US. Trade relations are normal or I wouldn't be here.
As I see it, Google has two options. Comply with the government's censorship demands, or stop doing business in the country. Neither of these does the citizens of China any good. If they comply with the censorship demands, there is still a lot of information that can be delivered to the people of China. It may not give them information for a revolution, but it can still add a lot of value to people's lives.
Yeah, if Google leaves China, it hurts their bottom line. But in what world does Google leaving China benefit the citizens of China?
You're making a straw man, a better example would be.
"You searched for John McCain. These results have been censored, find out why."
OR...
"John McCain Kills Homeless Man in Self Defense, Film at 11"
Parts of Google are being censored, but you are informed of it, and Google is not altering the content of the items being censored in any way whatsoever. So if you manage to find a way to get through the censor, Google has no power to alter the content of the page. What, do you think someone at Google goes through the NYTimes and edits the editorial content there to be more palatable to Chinese concerns so that when its googled, the fake NYTimes pages come up? Get real. If anything, the NYTimes would oblige the Chinese government themselves sooner than that would happen.
Human Rights has different definition in different countries. Trying to force your version of human rights on to other people is by itself a violation of other people's human rights.
I agree in the shades of gray sense. If someones version of human rights in genocidal, or repressive, then I disagree. If the people don't have the right to change their lot, then I would disagree. Its very hard to ethically argue that non-representational governments are ethically fine.
BUT... As a culture with a standard of human rights, we must ACT accordingly, not matter who we are dealing with. This is not forcing it upon them, but not acting according to their policies that we disagree with. If we don't agree with the actions of Sudan, then we should not facilitate these actions. This isn't forcing them to stop anything, nor is it violating their rights, it is respecting our own.
China violates our standards, therefore it would not be unconscionable to NOT do business with them. We should act according to our principles at all times.
We can also argue thusly; By being ethically supporting governments that violate our prevelant conception of human rights, we are facilitating this, meaning we are acting AGAINST our own principles.
I also haven't swallowed the cultural relativism kool-aid. I can make an ethical stand against the actions of others still. I can say that country X is wrong, or behaving unethically. This isn't to say that my country is 100% correct, its just saying that I have standards (avoiding the nationalism trap). China does not support the right of the people to choose, or deny, their own government, therefore the rights of the people are forfeit. The rights any group of people choose for themselves are irrelevant, the ability to choose is all that matters.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Of course censorship is wrong. Do you see anyone here promoting it?
First:
Here's how it currently stands:
Google: Searches are filtered. Searches that are censored come back with a notice that the search has been modified. Any user can then use provided links and information to find out which department of the government is responsible.
They are informed that they are not allowed to be informed, and by whom.
Baidu: Searches are filtered. No notice, no information, you don't even know something is missing.
Which would you prefer if you were a Chinese user?
Second:
"Clearly in order to appease the Chinese authorities Google now have smart people employed in figuring out how to better censor the internet."
Care to back that up? "Clearly" their informing of the user might actually do more to inform them, or at the very least make known to them the oppression of free speech.
"I'm not saying boycott China or anything like that, simply that western corporations should be forced to adhere to the same ethical standards in China they would be forced to in the West."
By whom? The governments under which they operate? The UN? The WTO? Who gets to decide ethics *now*? Screw centuries of culture and beliefs, we'll *make* them bend to our ethics? Have you even ever *been* to China?
"There should be regulation to prevent this kind of thing in any country that even pretends to care about freedom of speech."
*laughing*
Makes sense. Does nothing to support your argument, since China obviously *doesn't* care, but hey...