Online

"Do Less Evil"

By: Sue Denim

Posted: 05/03/2007

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Defining "evil" isn't easy, and for Internet search behemoth Google it seems to have become much more complicated lately. The board of directors for the company, which has as its corporate motto "do less evil," has recommended shareholders vote down at the annual meeting on May 10 a resolution that would require the company to resist governmental censorship efforts.

The resolution, drafted by the Office of the Comptroller of New York City and included in a proxy statement Google prepared for the annual meeting, calls freedom of speech and freedom of the press "fundamental human rights" and notes "free use of the Internet is protected in Article 19 of the [United Nations'] Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom to 'receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.'" Because "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 … 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…shareholders request that management institute policies to help protect freedom of access to the Internet."

The New York City comptroller's office serves as the trustee for several public-employee retirement funds that together own 486,617 shares of Google's Class A common stock valued at approximately $228.2 million. (Interestingly, the City Council of New York in February took a similarly tough stand in resisting the Patriot Act's provision that libraries, businesses, and governmental agencies comply with secretive federal requests for personal information about customers and employees.)

The resolution states Google and other technology companies have an obligation to comply with the Declaration of Human Rights and to protect the personal liberties and sometimes lives of residents in countries governed by totalitarian regimes by safeguarding their 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.

Although Google famously faced down the U.S. Department of Justice over requests for search records related to child pornography and other illegal activities (while rivals Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN provided them) and when it appeared in December the comptroller's resolution received widespread support from groups like Reporters Without Borders, it is considered unlikely to pass because Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt, who together hold 66.2 percent of the shareholder voting power, sit on the board of directors that has recommended defeating the resolution. None of the men offered an explanation for the board's stance, but shortly after launching the heavily censored (at the demand of the Chinese government) Google.cn Chinese search engine Schmidt told the 2006 World Economic Forum, "We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil." In other words, Google essentially was given the choice to censor or be censored, and it chose to censor.

The company's decision could have grown out of Google's financial model. According to the text of a Page- and Brin-authored letter Google included with the public-offering prospectus it circulated prior to becoming a publicly traded company in 2004, "We make our services as widely available as we can by supporting over 97 languages and by providing most services for free. Advertising is our principal source of revenue…." China is the world's most populous country, and search-engine advertising in that country was expected to draw significant revenue when Google.cn launched.

According to First Amendment attorney Lawrence Walters, the Google board's recommendation should not necessarily be taken as an indication the company is willing to "do some evil" in situations where evil is financially expedient. Constant tension exists between U.S.-based multinational companies like Google and less-open-minded governments in countries where they operate, and Google and its brethren face delicate balancing acts in those regions. "The concept of First Amendment freedoms is cherished in the U.S., but it doesn't have as much weight in other countries," Walters noted. "The main reasons for censorship in those areas are social and governmental stability; we don't feel threatened by the possibility of a bloody coup here. It would be great if everybody felt the same as we do, but they don't."

Still, Walters noted the censorship issue represents a particularly "slippery slope," not only because censoring search-engine results lends and air of authority to the officially approved side of multi-faceted issues, but also because once given a taste of the power self-imposed censorship might represent, search engines could decide to censor virtually anything anywhere voluntarily in exchange for government favors.

Google is not the only search engine under the watchful eye of the New York City comptroller's office. According to the Financial Times, the office submitted to Yahoo an identical resolution for consideration during Yahoo!'s annual meeting in June. Yahoo! received harsh international criticism last year after providing the Chinese government with personal details about a dissident who subsequently was arrested and jailed.