The NY Sun reports that William Thompson Jr., the current comptroller of New York City, has been pressuring Google and Yahoo over operating ethically and legally overseas. Thompson “filed shareholder resolutions calling on the two search engines to create practices for dealing with censorship issues in communist countries like China, North Korea, and Cuba, as well as other “authoritarian” regimes including Iran, Syria, Burma, and Egypt.” He wants Google and Yahoo not to do “proactive censorship.”

NYC owns about “$276 million worth of Google stock and about $110 million worth of Yahoo stock,” which is a small fraction of each company but can still be used to put some pressure on Google and Yahoo. The NYC Mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, has yet to comment on this resolution. Jon Murchinson, a Google spokesperson said, “We, like our shareholders, place great importance on conducting business at home and abroad in an ethical and legal manner. We look forward to this resolution being considered by our shareholders at our next company meeting.” There are no comments from Yahoo, as of yet.

Related Topics: Google: Outside US | Legal: Censorship | Yahoo: Outside US

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz