Google Shareholders to Pressure Company
To Resist Foreign Governments' Censorship

A Wired Magazine blog reports that five public pension funds which hold Google stock will formally ask the company next month to begin resisting censorship edicts of authoritarian governments such as China. Bravo for them. The item caught my eye in part because I hadn't seen it reported anywhere else yet, and also because last year I wrote about how Google was disgracefully knuckling under to a crude form of Chinese government censorship (the company agreed to block access for Chinese web-surfers to a list of seemingly banal query words). That entry drew some especially smart and interesting comments at the time. In the past, I've also pointed to a great article in Mother Jones about how Google, despite it's noble talk of doing no evil, tends to take the path of expediency when faced with difficult management decisions. So remember, Googleites, it's not what you say that counts, but what you do. Meanwhile, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, who seems intent on turning the clock back to the bad old days of his country's history, is making noises about adding Internet censorship to his long list of moves toward media repression.