AT ITS ANNUAL general meeting today, search engine giant
Google is having to fight off two shareholder motions that
will try to force the company into taking more of an anti
censorship stand, as well as standing up more for human rights.
It seems that the company’s “don’t be evil”
mantra, might not be good enough for some shareholders, who
will attempt to use the meeting as a platform to air views
that Google is not doing all it can when it comes to all things
humanitarian and pro Internet freedom.
Amnesty International will be proposing one of the two motions,
which would make the search engine behemoth "use all
legal means to resist censorship", and in cases where
it had been forced to self censor itself, Google should inform
users it had done so.
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The motion seems to take direct aim at Google China, which,
when the company launched it in early 2006, voluntarily offered
to censor its own results, in return for being allowed greater
access to the Chinese market. Google has maintained that its
policy of self censoring does not make it bad, since giving
the Chinese access to some information is better than leaving
them with no access to information. But Amnesty is not buying
the company spin, saying " There are often national laws
or opportunities within the law in China to stand up against
requests by officials to do this kind of censorship and the
companies like Google have just complied very easily".
Google will vehemently oppose the motion, arguing that it
makes little business sense, seeing as any move to stand up
to the Chinese government would likely result in Google China
being shut down. Also, seeing as the top three Google execs
control about two-thirds of the voting shares between them,
it is highly unlikely that the motion would pass. Last year,
when a similar motion was proposed, it only managed to pull
in 3.8 per cent of shareholders’ votes.
A second motion being proposed by a California-based investment
manager, Harrington Investments, is asking for Google’s
board of directors to form a human rights committee.
A research and advocacy director at Harrington, Jack Ucciferri,
told BBC news that "if the directors don't formally engage
issues, then any other program, policy, or procedure is essentially
meaningless in terms of assuring shareholders that these issues
are being taken seriously."
But Google already thinks that its directors waste enough
time pondering human rights dilemmas, and don’t see
the point in spending any more time on the matter. Time is
money, don’t you know.
Mr Ucciferri is concerned, however, noting that big tech
companies “continue to have very vague policies around
human rights and frequent violations of their own policies".
Just like governments then. µ
L’Inq
BBC
