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Tracking usersTracking usersPosted Feb 16, 2012 15:48 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Tracking users by KaiRo Parent article: Tracking users
As a for-profit corporation, Google by law has an obligation to provide the best possible profit to its shareholders, the "mission" you cite can merely be a tool for that for some time and has to be bent as far as possible or even broken when it has only a slight conflict with making profit for shareholders. Citation needed™. If you talk about a fiduciary duty then note that it does not say that for-profit corporation should pump it's own stock as much as possible (to help speculators). Rather it says that "people in charge" should work on maximizing profits in principle. And if the core asset of your corporation is goodwill related to your core mission then you'll need enormous bottom line hit before you'll be able to force any changes contrary to said mission. As a non-profit foundation, Mozilla by law has an obligation to stick by its mission or lose its status. There's no possibility to bend or break it and still comply with laws. Of course there is! Without money or mindshare it's harder to follow on your mission and that means that you can easily justify small sacrifices for the greater good (precisely what we are discussing here, after all). The are full specter of possibilities between Even shooting your father was business not personal, Sonny! and I have to finish what I started, even if I'm forced to do it alone! - and levels of dedication to the core mission in Google's and Mozilla's cases are closer then you think despite different legal status.
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Tracking users Posted Feb 16, 2012 18:49 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
even if the responsibility is to maximise profits, nothing in that says that it's to maximise _short_term_ profits. In fact, frequently things that maximise short term profits hurt you in the long term.
goodwill is one of those things that sacrificing for short term profits will hurt you in the long term.
In any case, the mission of a public company is not to make profits, it's to do whatever the company charter says the company does.
If the company charter says that the mission of the company is to break-even or produce a modest profit while producing the most public good, then the company is not a non-profit, but at the same time, if the company directors start making decisions to maximise profits they are working against the company charter and are in violation of the law.
Yes, some companies have their charter say that they are in business to make as much money as they can, but that's not all companies. In google's case there is the famous "Do no Evil" statement, and while there can be disagreement on exactly what that means, one thing that it clearly DOES mean is that google doesn't prioritise making money over every other consideration, and if any company directors started doing so, they are breaking the law.
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