The New York State Pension Funds has submitted a shareholder resolution calling for Google to implement new policies to uphold freedom of speech and protect user privacy. According to the Financial Times, they have submitted an identical resolution for Yahoo!'s annual meeting in June.
Google's board of directors is recommending that shareholders vote against this resolution at Google's May 10th shareholder meeting. They give no explanation why.
Company spokespeople are saying nothing more to the press, despite the fact that Google - along with Yahoo! and Microsoft - is involved with a process to develop corporate standards on freedom of expression and privacy. Back in January I wrote that these companies were finally displaying some cojones by joining that process. But it is a closed-door process, and unfortunately they still don't seem to have the guts to engage in a meaningful public conversation about these issues. I guess they're just hoping the media won't pay this too much heed, and focus on Google executive compensation instead.
Below is the full text of Proposal Number 5, submitted by The City of New York Office of the Comptroller, which runs the pension funds for the New York City Police and Fire departments, retirement systems for the NYC Employees, Teachers, and City Board of Education, etc:
Internet Censorship
Whereas, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are fundamental human rights, and free use of the Internet is protected in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom to “receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers”, and
Whereas, the rapid provision of full and uncensored information through the Internet has become a major industry in the United States, and one of its major exports, and
Whereas, political censorship of the Internet degrades the quality of that service and ultimately threatens the integrity and viability of the industry itself, both in the United States and abroad, and
Whereas, some authoritarian foreign governments such as the Governments of Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam block, restrict, and monitor the information their citizens attempt to obtain, and
Whereas, technology companies in the United States such as Google, that operate in countries controlled by authoritarian governments have an obligation to comply with the principles of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and
Whereas, technology companies in the United States have failed to develop adequate standards by which they can conduct business with authoritarian governments while protecting human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression,
Therefore, be it resolved, that shareholders request that management institute policies to help protect freedom of access to the Internet which would include the following minimum standards:
1) Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.
2) The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.
3) The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
4) Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.
5) Users should be informed about the company’s data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.
6) The company will document all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.
Google does manipulate search results.
For example, when you search google while logged in to your gmail account, your search results will be different from someone who is not logged in to gmail.
Website owners must also take responsibility by not "manipulating" google crawlers. A lot of website owners are forming "networks" where the website owners of the network put links to each other's website, thus raising their "google score" ensuring a greater chance of being ranked higher in google's searches. They make it easy so those who are in their "clique" would put up a link that points to the same website knowing full well that doing so would raise their page rankings.
An entire industry dedicated to helping websites achieve high page rankings have spawned up, called "Search Engine Optimization or SEO".
The issue of website owners manipulating their websites to obtain higher search rankings must be addressed simultaneously with government manipulation of web search engines. If website owners can manipulate search engines, why can't governments? Do governments not have the same rights?
Posted by: mahathir_fan | April 06, 2007 at 02:32 AM