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Google CEO Eric Schmidt Photo: Google's media relations |
Google Shareholders Revolt
Against Censorship, Board
Says a Little Evil Censorship
Better Than No Google at All
Sunday, May 06, 2007
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Thompson |
William C. Thompson wants Google to do no evil in countries with authoritarian regimes and adopt a policy that forbids Google censorship.
Thompson is no gadfly. He is New York City’s comptroller and oversees the city’s pension funds. He wants Yahoo to adopt the same policy. The city’s pension fund controls about $124 million in
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Yahoo stock and $338 million of Google stock, according to the Bloomberg News service.
Thompson has proposed the anti-censorship rules for Google and Yahoo’s upcoming shareholders’ meetings. Google's shareholders' meeting begins Thursday, May 10, 2007, in Mountain View, California.
But Google is resisting Thompson’s proposal. Its board is urging shareholders to vote against Thompson’s idea, according to networkworld.com.
Last year Google came under intense criticism because it bowed to the wishes of Chinese officials. Google’s Chinese search engine blocks search results that the Chinese Communist government wanted censored.
Yahoo also has been criticized for its cooperation with the Chinese government and was sued in San Francisco in April of 2007 by Yu Ling, the wife of Wang Xiaoning. In 2003, Wang was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He edited journals calling for “political reform and a multiparty state,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported on April 19, 2007. Yu’s American attorney claims Yahoo signed an agreement with the Chinese government that it would monitor and censor electronic communication “that might endanger state security and to report any such communication to the government,” the Chronicle reported.
“It’s a part of doing business in China,” Yahoo spokesman Jim Cullinan told the Chronicle. He told the Chronicle that Yahoo turns over documents under “threat of civil and criminal penalties.”
Google has a policy of doing no evil. However, Google’s Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said his company decided some censorship in China would be better than not supplying Chinese with Google Internet tools.
“We concluded that although we weren’t wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all,” Schmidt was quoted as saying in 2006. “We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.”
