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New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr., on behalf of the New York City Pension Funds, is calling on Yahoo! to establish a set of standards to enforce policies to protect freedom of access to the Internet across the globe.

Next week, June 12, 2007, Yahoo! shareholders will vote on a resolution filed by the Pension Funds at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Santa Clara, California.

“We must ensure that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are preserved,” Thompson said. “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.”

The New York City Employees’ Retirement System, New York City Police Department Pension Fund, New York City Fire Department Pension Fund, Teachers’ Retirement System of New York and New York City Board of Education Retirement System sponsored the measure. They have 4,504,336 Yahoo! shares valued at $123,689,067.

Yahoo! initially tried to block the resolution. On February 7, Yahoo! asked the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to not include the measure in its 2997 Proxy Statement. However, the SEC did not agree with the request.

Yahoo! has come under criticism from human rights organizations including Amnesty International, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch, as well as members of Congress, for it’s co-operation with the Chinese government in the political censorship of its internet services in that country. Recently, Yahoo! became the first internet company to be sued in the United States for human rights violations in China. The suit was brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act by a Chinese political dissident, Wang Xiaoning, who was jailed on the basis of personal ID information handed over to the Chinese government by Yahoo!.

The resolution – which can be viewed at www.comptroller.nyc.gov - calls for management at Yahoo! to institute policies, with certain minimum standards, to protect freedom of access to the Internet. Those standards include:

• 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;

• The company will not engage in pro-active censorship;

• 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;

• Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that users are trying to access;

• Users should be informed about the company’s data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties; and,

• The company will document all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.

Thompson filed similar resolutions with Google and the Microsoft Corporation this proxy season. The Pension Funds have 700,719 shares valued at $338,082,903 in Google. On May 10, shareholders voted at the annual meeting this in Mountain View, CA. Google refused to release any figures on the votes for our resolution, although they announced that it had not passed.

The Pension Funds have 28,105,674 shares valued at $870,432,724 in Microsoft, which is based on Redmond, WA. Microsoft’s annual meeting is held November 1.

The resolutions identify a series of foreign governments -  Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam – that block, restrict and monitor information.

“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’,” the resolutions read. “Technology companies in the United States… that operate in countries controlled by authoritarian governments have an obligation to comply with the principles of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.”

Besides Thompson, the Pension Fund trustees are:

New York City Fire Department Pension Fund: Mayor Michael Bloomberg; New York City Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta (Chair); New York City Finance Commissioner Martha E. Stark; Stephen Cassidy, President, James Slevin, Vice President, Robert Straub, Treasurer, and John Kelly, Brooklyn Representative and Chair, Uniformed Firefighters Association of Greater New York; Peter Gorman, President and Captains’ Rep., Nicholas J. Visconti, Chiefs’ Rep., and Stephen J. Carbone, Lieutenants’ Rep., Uniformed Fire Officers Association; and, Joseph Gagliardi, Marine Engineers Association.

New York City Police Pension Fund: Mayor Michael Bloomberg; New York City Finance Commissioner Martha E. Stark; New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly (Chair); Patrick Lynch, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association; Michael Palladino, Detectives Endowment Association; Edward Mullins, Sergeants Benevolent Association; Anthony Garvey, Lieutenants Benevolent Association; and, John Driscoll, Captains Endowment Association.

New York City Employees’ Retirement System: New York City Finance Commissioner Martha E. Stark (Chair); New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum; Borough Presidents Scott Stringer (Manhattan), Helen Marshall (Queens), Marty Markowitz (Brooklyn), Adolfo Carrion (Bronx), and James Molinaro (Staten Island); Lillian Roberts, Executive Director, District Council 37, AFSCME; Roger Toussaint, President Transport Workers Union Local 100; and, Gregory Floyd, President, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 237.

Teachers’ Retirement System of New York: New York City Finance Commissioner Martha E. Stark (Chair); Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm, New York City Department of Education; and, Sandra March, Melvyn Aaronson and Mona Romain, all of the United Federation of Teachers.

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