Believing that approving a resolution requiring Google Inc. to adopt tougher anti-censorship policies would have required the company to shut down its Chinese search engine, shareholders on Thursday rejected the measure.
"We appreciate the spirit of this proposal," Google Chief Legal Counsel David Drummond told shareholders before the vote. "However, [the board of directors opposes] the proposal because we don't think that at the end of the day it advances the causes of free expression and access to information.... Pulling out of China, shutting down Google.cn, is to us not the right thing to do at this point and is not the answer to the Internet censorship problem."
The resolution, submitted by the Office of the Comptroller of New York City on behalf of the public-employee retirement funds it manages (which together own significant Google common stock), urged Google to comply with the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights by refusing to self-censor in countries with totalitarian regimes, safeguarding users' personal data, refusing to engage in proactive censorship, complying with censorship demands only when presented with legally binding procedures, informing users when the company has acceded to governmental requests or shared personally identifiable information with third parties, and making publicly available the instances in which it has complied with those requests.
The comptroller's office submitted a similar resolution to Yahoo! for consideration during its annual meeting in June. According to Patrick Doherty, a representative of the New York City Pension Fund, the measures were submitted to encourage the search engines to "make special efforts to avoid being seen as complicit in human rights abuses … and not be proactive in censorship." Both companies have been criticized for their roles in restricting search data in countries in which censorship is institutionalized by the local government, and Yahoo! has faced severe criticism for turning over to a foreign government personal data about at least one dissident who subsequently was imprisoned.
For its part, Google sees its censorship stance as "less evil" than abandoning markets altogether. Before the shareholders meeting, Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt told reporters gathered for a press conference, "Without in any way defending their laws and policies, the censored or omitted data comprises less than 1 percent of the answers … [so] the index is better, more relevant. We believe that as a result, the Chinese citizen has more information and more choices than they would had we not been in the country."
Google co-founder Larry Page told the crowd, "I think we can do a lot to improve the state of the world in very positive ways."
