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