RIYADH (Middle East Eye) – Google shareholders will push the tech giant this week to explain how it will protect digital rights as it launches a major project in Saudi Arabia which has a track record of spying on its critics.
A vote on the shareholder resolution, scheduled for Wednesday, is unlikely to pass because co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and former CEO Eric Schmidt control a majority of shareholder votes in Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
But digital rights advocates say it is a first-of-its-kind push from investors that could influence shareholders in other tech companies with cloud services in the Persian Gulf and beyond to be more transparent about how they deal with human rights risks on specific projects.
“The entire point of it is to send out a beacon that signals that shareholders care about fundamental human rights issues,” said Jan Rydzak, investor engagement manager with Washington, DC-based Ranking Digital Rights.
Google announced in December 2020 that it was opening a “cloud region” in Dammam as part of a joint venture with state-owned oil producer Saudi Aramco to tap into demand in the kingdom estimated to be worth $10bn by 2030.
A memorandum of understanding was signed in 2018 but negotiations between two of the world’s most valuable publicly listed firms reportedly stalled after the murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, when many foreign companies distanced themselves from the kingdom.
Four years later, with the deal moving forward, six investors - organized by San Francisco-based global advocacy group SumOfUs - have secured a resolution to be presented at Alphabet’s annual shareholder meeting. The company tried to get the proposal dropped from the vote, but the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ruled it would move forward.
“The big question that I have is: how do you do human rights due diligence in a country that has no respect for human rights? There are no elections, there are no civil liberties,” said Mohamad Najem, executive director of Social Media Exchange, a Beirut-based nonprofit defending and advocating for digital rights in the Middle East and North Africa.
The concerns of digital rights advocates over the cloud regions in the Persian Gulf are very simple: the UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia all have a history of human rights abuses, surveillance and repression of dissidents.