Dr. Eric Schmidt.
Thank you, and good morning to all of you for our annual shareholder meeting. We're so happy to have you guys here, and I hope you all enjoyed our breakfast. I'm gonna be presiding over the meeting, and everybody here should be registered. If not, just make sure that people know who you are and you've got your badges and so forth. Everybody should have an agenda, and on the agenda is a list of rules of procedure and how we actually do this meeting. At this time, I'd like to call the meeting to order. I wanted to mention we've got a number of executives and board members in the room. In particular, we have a number of board members. I see John Hennessy over here. I see Ann Mather. Obviously, I see our CEO and founder, Larry Page.
Let's see, who else do I see? I see David Drummond is here. He'll be speaking right after me. Patrick Pichette is here. Where is Patrick? There he is. Oh, there he is. Patrick standing. And Patrick, as you know, foolishly decided to retire to pursue the rest of his life, and his contribution to this company, to working for myself, for the board with Larry, obviously, is hard to describe. The contribution that he's made in terms of shareholder value for all of us has been fantastic. So thank you very much, Patrick. Fortunately, Patrick is such a good Canadian that he decided to find an even better replacement for himself in Ruth Porat, who's also here, and she is in the process of twinning and twinning with Patrick, which must be really rather extraordinary.
And you'll be taking over, you know, instantaneously, as I think roughly. Yeah. So Ruth is here as well. So the way we're gonna do this, I'm sorry. I wanted to introduce a couple more things. We have Maura Stanley. Where is Maura? There she is over here. And she's a representative of, yeah, she's a representative of Computershare, our transfer agent, who will also be our inspector of elections. And Barbara Marchini Ellis and Tara Murphy. Where are they? They're over here. And they are representatives of E&Y and Ernst & Young, who've been our very long-time independent accountants. Now, every year I get a chance to say something nice about David, and this year I can only say even nicer things about David. David was the executive who signed the incorporation papers of this corporation.
And he now runs an awful lot of the very interesting investments, programs, legal issues, business programs, global issues, public policy, and God knows what. David, please join us. Thank you, David.
Thanks, Eric. Welcome, everyone, to the 2015 annual stockholders meeting. I think this is number 11 or so for me. For the first time, I'm tireless. I figured I'd stick with the Silicon Valley tradition this year. We have the normal set of business in terms of electing directors and so forth, and a number of stockholder proposals. A quick note about the logistics for today. As stated in the rules, stockholders shouldn't address the meeting unless you're recognized. We'll provide a Q&A session after the formal part of the meeting, so you'll have a chance to ask some questions. If you wanna ask a question during that period, we've got some microphones in the aisle, so you can move to those microphone stands. Please identify yourself once you're recognized.
State that you're a stockholder or you're representing a stockholder, then go forward with your question. So thanks for your cooperation with the rules, and let's move forward. So I've received the affidavits of mailing from Computershare, which state that the notice of the meeting was duly given. All stockholders of Class A or Class B Common Stock, as of the close of business of April 6th, 2015, are entitled to vote today. In addition, I've been advised by the inspector of elections that holders of our outstanding Class A and Class B Common Stock, representing at least a majority of the voting power of those classes of stock entitled to vote, that a majority is represented here in person or by proxy. So therefore, a quorum is present, and the meeting is duly constituted, and we can go forward. First item is the election of directors.
We have 11 directors to be elected at today's meeting. And the directors elected today will hold office until next year's annual meeting of stockholders. We have the following nominees: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Diane Greene, John Hennessy, Ann Mather, Alan Mulally, Paul Otellini, Ram Shriram, and Shirley Tilghman. Now, our bylaws require that stockholders provide advance notice of their intent to nominate persons as directors. We haven't received any such notice, so accordingly, I declare nominations for directors closed. Now, the next matter for us to look at today is the ratification of the appointment by the board of directors of Ernst & Young as our independent registered public accounting firm. Our board has recommended that our stockholders ratify this appointment for the 2015 fiscal year.
The next matter, being submitted is the approval of an amendment, to our 2012 Stock Plan to increase the number of the maximum number of shares of our Class C capital stock that may be issued under this plan from 30 million shares to 47 million shares. Our board of directors has recommended that our stockholders approve this, and that's described in detail in our proxy statement. Now, the next five items, to be presented today are all stockholder proposals. Our board of directors, you should know, has recommended unanimously, that our stockholders vote against all five of these proposals that will be presented today. Now, the first stockholder proposal is being brought by Mr. John Chevedden, Mr. James McRitchie, and the NorthStar Asset Management Funded Pension Plan as the co-lead filers, and Sonen Capital as a co-filer. I believe we have, Ms. Abigail Shaw.
There she is, of NorthStar Asset Management, and she'll be presenting the proposal. Ms. Shaw, you have three minutes.
Good morning. My name is Abigail Shaw from NorthStar Asset Management in Boston, the beneficial owner of over $2.6 million of Google Common Stock. As Google shareholders know, Google has three classes of stock: Class A with one vote per share, Class C with zero votes per share, and Class B with an overwhelming 10 votes per share, which is closely held by management insiders. This discrepancy hands over a supermajority of control of the firm to insiders, essentially making it impossible for stockholders to weigh in. Yet the concern we raise here is not just about fairness. We are also concerned that insiders and management seek to insulate the governance of the firm from shareholder oversight. Studies have shown that excessive voting control given to insiders leads to poor performance over the long term.
In fact, a study has performed that the more control that the insiders have, the more they can pursue strategies that are at the expense of outside shareholders. Studies have also shown that on average and over time, companies with multi-class capital structures underperform those with a one-share, one-vote standard in which owners' economic risk is commensurate with voting power. In a world where our company's primary purpose is to expand access to information and knowledge in an open and democratic way, limiting substantial shareholder input is wildly counterintuitive. We feel that shareholder value is best derived when insider voting control of the firm is separated from insider economic ownership. Economic ownership provides enough of a reward for management when stock prices rise. The current tri-class structure eliminates shareholder checks and balances over management decisions.
Without a tally of one vote per share, claiming that stockholders accepted or rejected a proposal means little more than that Mr. Page, Mr. Brin, and Mr. Schmidt voted for or against it. We are very concerned that over the long term, the use of insider control at Google will inhibit shareholders from weighing in on company governance and policy issues, with detrimental effect on shareholder value over the long term. We urge you to vote for proxy item number four. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Ms. Shaw. We have the second stockholder proposal, which is being brought by Walden Asset Management as the lead filer, and that's joined by a number of other organizations, including Sonen Capital. We have Ms. Danielle Ginach of Sonen Capital, who will be presenting this proposal. Oh, there she is. Ms. Ginach, you have three minutes. Floor is yours.
Thank you, and good morning. My name is Danielle Ginach of Sonen Capital, representing Walden Asset Management, the primary sponsor of this proposal. Together, we own over 115,000 shares of Google. On behalf of Sonen, Walden, and approximately 30 additional co-filers, including the State of Connecticut Pension Fund, I'm pleased to move resolution number five, seeking information on how Google directly and indirectly works to affect legislation and public policy. This request for transparency has been made to hundreds of companies, many of which have proactively adopted policies in favor of more robust lobbying transparency, indicating acknowledgment of this as a best practice. Google has spent over $63 million in federal lobbying in the last five years, ranking one of the top five companies in lobbying spending over the last two years.
While Google has taken steps toward disclosure, this resolution requests expanded disclosure of where these lobbying dollars go. While Google discloses a summary of direct federal lobbying on the website, there is incomplete disclosure about spending at the state level, where obtaining comprehensive lobbying information is described by an expert as, quote, "nearly impossible," given the Byzantine manner in which data is captured and made available online, end quote, effectively burying this information at the state level. Google lobbies extensively at the state level with what has been described as, quote, "an army of lobbyists from coast to coast to protect its emerging technologies from new rules and restrictions," end quote.
To make these activities more transparent and accessible, we recommend that Google provide a summary of dollars spent quarterly, as well as the major issues it has actively lobbied in favor of, at both the state and the federal levels. Google also does not disclose meaningful details beyond the names of over 100 trade and advocacy organizations it's a part of, how it evaluates their lobbying positions, or even the size of contributions made. These disclosures are absolutely necessary in order to evaluate Google's role in trying to affect legislation and regulation. We do wanna congratulate Google for the company's public decision to withdraw from ALEC, a known climate-denying group actively working to combat renewable energy standards at the state level. Google acted on its stated values when it withdrew from ALEC, an action we enthusiastically commend. However, there are other trade associations whose actions conflict with Google's values.
For example, Google's an active member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a group that has spent $1 billion on lobbying since 1998, which has already sued the EPA and plans to sue them again this summer once the EPA formulates its new regulations addressing climate change. Clearly, this creates an outright conflict with our stated environmental position to address, limit, and mitigate the effects of climate change. As a logical expression of stated policies, we ask that Google join Apple, Microsoft, and others in speaking out to proactively distance the company from the chamber's actions, which impede responsible climate policy, as well as ask that you join other companies in publicly endorsing necessary forward-looking legislation. Our company is a national leader in so many positive social and environmental values that deserve to be reflected in how our lobbying dollars are spent.
This resolution calling for disclosure and transparency around lobbying is an important step that strengthens Google's mantra of corporate responsibility and objective to do no evil. My colleague, Will Morgan, will second the resolution. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Ms. Ginach, we have the third proposal, which is being brought by the Firefighters Pension System of the City of Kansas City, Missouri. Maureen O'Brien of the Marco Consulting Group will be presenting this proposal. Good.
Good morning. Thank you. Good morning. My name's Maureen O'Brien, and I'm here to present the proposal on behalf of the Firefighters Pension System of the City of Kansas City, Missouri Trust. This proposal is very straightforward. What we're asking for is a majority vote standard when directors are elected to our board. As everybody here knows, the role of the board is to protect our investment by overseeing management, and we have the right to elect those directors every year at this meeting. The problem at Google is that the company uses a plurality vote standard. So if one person votes for director, that person's going to get elected because, for the most part, these elections aren't contested. There's the number of nominees match the number of seats for the board. So what we're asking for is a majority vote standard.
All that means is that to get a seat on the Google board, more than 50% of shareholders or shares voted would have to support that candidate. We think this is a pretty straightforward, common-sense policy. Many companies use this. Many companies in our sector use it, including Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Yahoo. So for a company that's a leader in so many other areas, we think you should use this best practice standard in corporate governance and adopt a majority vote standard. So please support our proposal. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Ms. O'Brien. The fourth stockholder proposal is being brought by Mr. Shelton Ehrlich, as the lead filer. Hello, Mr. Ehrlich, who's a frequent visitor to the annual meeting, so great to have you here again. The mic is yours for three minutes.
Thanks. I do come every year and criticize proposals like that, brought by Walden. They think that the Chamber of Commerce does evil. They don't. They protect us against lots of bad legislation by lobbying. And thank you, Google, for being a supporter. So this year, I decided I'd submit a proposal. This proposal asks that management tell Google's shareholders if their investments in renewables make economic sense. Management says its goal is 100% renewable electricity, but they don't explain why this is in the best interests of Google's owners. That's us. We ask management to compare buying power from the local power suppliers, as you and I do, with Google's investments in renewable but intermittent sources of electricity. What do I mean by intermittent?
If you drove over the Altamont Pass at about 7:30 A.M. to get here on time, you'd have noticed that ocean of windmills sitting still, not paying their way. In fact, on average, that wind farm only works 25% of the time and kills almost 5,000 birds every year. Talk about protecting the environment. Wind sucks. Google tells us in the proxy why you should vote no on my proposal because they've already provided all the information you'd need on this topic, but then they turn around and tell me if they give the information, it would hurt Google's competitive position in negotiating for power. Which is it? We've already got everything we need, or they dare not give it to us? It's not true that preparing the requested report would affect the company's competitive position. We ask for an aggregate analysis, not data center by data center.
How many dollars were spent, and how many kilowatts did those dollars buy, and how much do we pay for each kilowatt-hour, and how much would we have paid if we bought the power from the local utility, just as you and I do when we buy power for our homes or businesses? And by the way, I wondered, how much does the government kick in? I started my career in energy about 60 years ago and worked on making it, saving it, moving it, and with a few others, invented the main method for converting biomass into electricity used in California. I'll bet a few photons from these lights are coming from the biomass energy this morning. Please vote yes on this proposal so we can find out if Google is spending our dollars wisely. Thank you.
And thanks very much, Mr. Ehrlich. So the fifth and final stockholder proposal is being brought by the National Center for Public Policy Research. Mr. Justin Danhoff, there he is, will be presenting the proposal. You have the floor for three minutes.
Thanks, Mr. Drummond. My name is Justin Danhoff. I'm general counsel with the National Center for Public Policy Research, and I rise today to move our proposal that seeks greater transparency concerning Google's alternative energy projects. I agree with a lot of what Mr. Ehrlich said, that the current disclosures really don't give investors the full picture of what's going on because it's no secret that the federal government and many state and local governments offer substantial tax breaks and lavish grants and loans for renewable energy projects. Google has taken advantage of those taxpayer subsidies. So our proposal asks management to tell its shareholders one simple thing: if renewable energy projects such as solar and wind were forced to compete in an actual free market, would Google investors be at risk?
If politicians in Washington, Sacramento, and elsewhere change their minds about spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on green energy projects of private businesses like ours, what would the impact be on our shareholders? The company has claimed that it supports debate regarding energy policies, but as long as the company accepts grants and loans based on the belief that global warming is significantly caused by humans and it is a severe problem, the company has a clear conflict of interest. If the company promotes the global warming theory, it promotes policies that enhance the company's coffers. But if the company promotes any skepticism whatsoever, it risks undermining support for grants and loans for green energy projects. Management has already begun, so the company's desire to continue grants and loans for green energy appears to be undermining our management's admirable reputation as straight shooters.
In choosing, we believe unwisely, to withdraw from the free market American Legislative Exchange Council known as ALEC, Chairman Schmidt said ALEC was, quote, "literally lying," end quote, about climate change. But ALEC has no position on the degree to which climate change is occurring whatsoever and what the causes might be. ALEC simply promotes policies that reduce government interference with energy markets. So since ALEC has no position at all, its position can't be a lie. Mr. Schmidt was being dishonest, and the proponent of proposal five is simply lying to you. Schmidt's over-the-top statement, which, by the way, could unnecessarily make the company vulnerable to a lawsuit by ALEC, implies that Google is highly emotional about the climate change issue, which in turn raises the possibility that the company is very reliant on energy policies that provide lavish subsidies for renewable energy projects.
If this is so, don't shareholders deserve to know the extent of the company's exposure? American taxpayers heavily subsidize renewable energy projects. These subsidies are not permanent. We have legitimate concerns that potential changes in government policies on alternative energy may harm the company's investors. If you wanna know the risk that Google is taking with your investment, please vote for our proposal. Thank you.
Thanks, Mr. Danhoff. That concludes the presentation of the stockholder proposals. Because no further business is scheduled to come before the meeting, we're going to open the polls. If you've previously voted by proxy, you don't need to vote here today unless you wanna change your vote. It's important to tell you that we've received sufficient proxies before the meeting to know that all the proposals discussed today will either pass or fail in accordance with the recommendations that were made by our board of directors that are described in the proxy statement. However, we wanna make sure that everyone gets a chance to vote. If you wanna vote and you've requested a ballot when you registered, please complete that now. We'll give you a moment to fill that out if you haven't.
And then if you could raise your hand, and, you know, so we have some folks who can go collect your ballot, if you need them to. Anyone else have a ballot that needs to be collected? There's one in the back. One here. Okay. It looks like we've got most all the ballots collected. So I can declare the polls closed. So here are the results. I've been advised by the inspector of elections that the nominees for the election to the board of directors have been duly elected.
I'm also advised that a majority of the shares of our Class A and Class B common stock that were entitled to vote and that were present here today voted in favor of the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young to act as our independent registered public accounting firm for the 2015 fiscal year, as well as the approval of an amendment to our 2012 Stock Plan. Therefore, each of these proposals has been approved by our stockholders.
I've also been advised that a majority of the shares of our Class A and Class B common stock, again entitled to vote and present here today, have actually voted against the stockholder proposal regarding equal shareholder voting, the stockholder proposal regarding a lobbying report, the stockholder proposal regarding the adoption of a majority vote standard for our election of directors, and the stockholder proposal regarding renewable energy costs, and finally against the stockholder proposal regarding a report on the business risk related to climate change regulation. So therefore, each of these stockholder proposals has not been approved by the stockholders. As soon as possible after the meeting, probably in the next few days, we'll complete the final vote tabulations and we'll provide that final result of the final vote on our investor relations website and in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
That ends the formal portion of the meeting. This part is adjourned, and Eric will make some remarks. I'll turn it back over to Eric. I do have to read some fine print and let you know that the remarks, presentations, product demos, and answers to questions that you might ask contain forward-looking statements about Google's business outlook and other matters. Actual results, of course, and outcomes for these matters may differ from these forward-looking statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties. Those risks, of course, are described in great detail in our public filings with the SEC.
Do you think we look like brothers here?
Yes.
No time. All right?
Well done. Well done.
A new fashion statement, David.
All righty.
Thank you all. It's great. It's a big day here, and I'm really happy that you all are coming. I actually enjoy the debate and enjoy the questions. So I had a number of comments I wanted to make from my perspective, as the company. I've had the pleasure of being here for more than 14 years. What is the impulse? What is the sort of heart that beats that Google is sort of trying to do these things? I'm thinking about it, and I've decided that it's really about asking hard questions and therefore searching for better answers to those sort of hard questions. And search can be understood as our first product, is a metaphor that we think about an invention. Take something that matters in people's lives and find a better way to do it.
As everybody here knows, Larry and Sergey were at Stanford, you know, doing whatever graduate students do, and they were wandering around doing search. The answers that they were getting were just not very good. So the two of them, as part of their undergraduate work, actually invented a new algorithm for organizing information. It's an example because they had a unique technical insight. They didn't do it the way the other folks did. All right. That started this entire process. Of course, once you've solved it, you're not done, right? It's not like they invented the solution. They invented the 0.1% solution of something that was a far grander vision around organizing information.
It's interesting if you fast forward a couple of years. In 2000, Jennifer J.Lo, basically Jennifer Lopez, wore a beautiful green dress, and everybody was excited about this particular dress and was searching for it, and there was no way for us to surface this. A set of engineers said, "Maybe we could do a product, which today is known as Google Image Search, which could actually index and find these." Boom, a whole new category, billions and billions of queries today in that regard. It's also interesting that at around the same time, people said, "Holy cow, people don't just speak English in the world," right? People started, right? Like a shock, right? All of a sudden, people started thinking, "What are we gonna do about translation?" 'Cause at the time, the majority of the web was all English.
Indeed, Google Translate was born, which now today has more than a billion free translations every day in 80 different languages. And by the way, it does it without a dictionary, which is what I think is extraordinary. We did the same thing with maps. People would query Champs-Élysées, and all of a sudden, they wouldn't get the right map. And so people figured out we built a map of the whole world, and we did it, you know, satellite picture, driving, and all that together. What's interesting is now mobile is important, right? Everybody here has the same problem, but if you're like me and you have big fat fingers, it's sort of hard to type. Voice search was inspired by the fact that people said there's gonna be a lot of mobile, right?
People are gonna talk, and all of a sudden, voice search, again, done without a dictionary. Again, it's magic. It's an example of innovation. And so, you know, when I hear people say, "Search is a solved problem," they clearly don't understand the gap between what people really want and what is technologically possible today. And that gap is what Google tries to close, so let me give you an example. "Show me flights under $500 for places where it's hot in December and I can snorkel." Right? Perfectly reasonable query. Try that query. You're not gonna get the perfect answer yet. Now, it turns out it's interesting that Google actually knows about flights under $500. We know about hot destinations in winter. We know places near the water, and we know cool fish to see.
What Google doesn't know, by the way, is I don't snorkel anymore, but it's a separate discussion. So the fact of the matter is that we're getting close to being able to answer those kinds of conversational questions, which from my perspective, in search, is the holy grail. But think about how cool that would be. And what I would argue they argue is that with all of the proliferation of devices, the ability to navigate through all of this, whether it's on your phone or on your computer or whatever, voice and text and so forth, is really part of our future. And we had a sort of similar idea around Google Play, right?
That basically, when you buy something on Google Play and you're reading a document or watching a movie, whenever you switch to a different document, all of a sudden, there you are. It's seamless from the standpoint of a normal person. Now, this is a great vision, right, in my view. I think everybody agrees if you're one of the couple billion that's connected. But what about the five billion that are not? What about them? They're human beings just like us, and we need to serve them as well. One day, one of the teams that Sergey was leading actually came in and said, "We have an idea to put a balloon that would use height and wind in the stratosphere to navigate to move around to provide 4G telephony service." And I made a bet that it would never work, right?
I was so convinced that this idea was so outrageously audacious, and of course, the team not only made it work, but it's now operational in the Southern Hemisphere. This is extraordinary, right? This is an extraordinary step. It's a true invention, something which even many, many people I knew thought that you couldn't do telephony from balloons up from that altitude, right? It shows you the passion and the ideas of basically people who just see a different world, and they work here. So, you know, you sit there and you think about rural students in Brazil or rural people in New Zealand, right, who did never have access to telephony, let alone the internet, and now they get it, and they get it at an affordable price working with the local telco.
If you sort of follow this sort of model of the core mission, where we put most of our money, our sort of mantra is, "If you do something useful, everything else follows." We don't start from the position of, "Oh, here's a business plan, and here's a large market." What we try to identify is here's a problem that has to get solved, and it has to get solved in an interesting way. You know, we do this, think about ads, right, and the democratization of our ad service, and now even large firms and small firms. I remember when I first came here, there's these huge debates as to whether the big advertisers would get preference over the little advertisers.
Larry and Sergey took the position, I think quite rightly, that it's a market, and everyone stands on his or her, her own economics, and we'll let the market and the auction work out. And of course, that will ultimately change the world. Now, it's interesting. So when we define what we're trying to do, our goal is to build for the entire world, not just for the rich people, not just for the developed world, not just for any particular group.
So if you think of our market as not the two plus billion people that are using smartphones and on the web, but rather the seven billion or so that are our ultimate target market, you see how far we have to go and how much larger the enterprise and our mission can evolve, especially if you include all the other things that we're focusing on. It was interesting. I was in a meeting yesterday where the Governor of California, Governor Brown, spoke, and he used the quote, "Let's be unreasonable but in an intelligent way," right? And I liked that, right? Let's ask for things which are unreasonable, but let's do it in a clever way. You sit there and you go, "Well, okay. I got it. I got this search thing.
I got the ads thing." What about self-driving cars and healthcare and all the other things that we've begun to invest in, although the majority of our investment is obviously in the first stuff I talked about? And our strategy is to focus on things which are not just relevant now but for the next generation. Most companies, in my observation, having done this for a long time, ultimately fail because they do one thing very well, but they don't anticipate the next thing. They don't broaden their mission. They don't challenge themselves. They don't continually build on that platform for sort of a greater impact of one kind or another. And what they do is they end up being incrementalists. And Google is very committed to not doing that, 'cause we understand that technological change is revolutionary, essentially revolutionary, not evolutionary.
An engineering team led by a very, very smart doctor had the idea of doing we could read a diabetic's blood from tears using a contact lens. Do you think that matters? If you assume that one-third of Americans are gonna be diabetic by the end of our lives, which is roughly the current projection, it matters a lot, right? And that team, a very small team, built the world's smallest battery, right, with this extraordinary engineering thing, is now licensed to a large pharmaceutical that's busy trying to productize that. What about car accidents? Everybody here has been touched by some sort of car tragedy. 1.2 million people are killed in traffic accidents every year. That's like a 737 crash every day, right? And yet we accept this. How is this possible? 93% of these crashes are caused by human error.
We are very, very close, right, to having cars that really can drive without operator intervention. And I'm convinced that 100 years from now, when our successors, children, grandchildren, whatever, are sitting there watching the movies, and they're gonna see some handsome young actor in an old movie get in the car and start driving it, they're all gonna giggle. And they're gonna say, "You let that guy drive a car? Right? What a dangerous concept. It makes no sense, right? Computers should do this better, and they don't drink," and all those sorts of things. So, so, so in this context, what are sort of the big bets, right, in computing? And let me say this for computer science in general, of course, Google being a leader. Well, clearly, Android, majority market share, and iOS, from Apple.
Think of it as the powerful supercomputer in your hand, billions and billions of times better than the mainframes of old that I grew up on. Think about the fast networks that we're building. I like to think of it as one broadband, a fast 4G network and the fiber that we're and others are installing around the world. Google-scale cloud computing. Google has very, very powerful offerings in this area, and of course, that's what our platforms are built on, infinitely expandable with large data sets and so forth. And of course, the web revolution. The web is not so the app revolution. The web is not dead, but apps have taken a lot of our attention. And so moving from think of it as from search to making suggestions, right, from saying, "This is a good idea. That is a good idea." And I think, what are the wow moments? Now, I stood literally on the stage as we introduced Google Earth, almost a decade ago, and I remember telling the story that my wow moment for Google was the day I realized that from the safety of my office right over there, I could traverse the top of Mount Everest, right? To me, that was a wow moment 'cause I knew I'd never have the courage to actually do that kind of stuff. So what's a wow moment now? Well, I'll let me tell you one. A wow moment is the day you realize that you depend so much on your phone, right? Your life is so integrated in your phone.
A day, the day that you put your whole genome into the cloud, and we're beginning to enable this with partners, and researchers can use it to help map the cancer genome and help others in a profound way. The day that you realize that you're alive because a computer saved you. Think of airbags and automatic cars. The day that you have a 3D image projected to you of your grandson. And we're close to being able to do that sort of thing. The day that you can see a blind man who can now see, right, because of a retinal implant. And what he said to me was, "I can now see with my eyes closed." You wanna know what's important? That's what's important. Google is working on all of this technology in one way or another.
And so when I think about the future, and I'll finish up by saying, I'm really convinced that computer science and the platforms that we're all building on will be changed by machine learning. Google is a major player in machine learning. Technically, what we do is we take layers of networks, and we build up information. When you use Google Image Search and you look for tags, if you look at our photo product that we announced last week, which appears to be the most profound change in photo and photo organization in the history of large-scale photos and photo organization, and the reviews have been fantastic, it uses these kinds of techniques to figure out, to the degree possible, what's inside these pictures.
These algorithms take in some sense you take a lot of data, you train it, and you produce a new program. That's the magic of this new machine learning model. It works particularly well for very large data sets. If you have lots of data, which Google in fact has, whether it's search data or location data or picture data or so forth, large training sets, you really can make things that make your life that much more powerful. A possible future is you could imagine a world where the computer helps suggest what you could do or what you should learn today. You could send me a summary of something, right, that you could make me smarter on something that I know about.
The most extraordinary thing about that is that applies to every one of the seven billion people on the planet. That's what's so proud about. This is not some luxury product for an elite, that these techniques and algorithms will really make everyone on the world that much smarter. A smarter world, in my view, is one of the greatest goals for our future. So when I, sort of put this together and I say, "What is Google about?" I think it's asking difficult questions and searching for these better answers, right? We start from first principles. I gave you a series of examples. We build something that's very useful, right? It's got flaws and so forth. We know it's very useful, but maybe people didn't even know that they needed it, but it changes their lives. We aspire to serve everyone.
Remember I said it's not a two billion person audience. It's a seven billion and growing audience, and we have a healthy disregard, in my view, for the impossible. We're not perfect. We make mistakes. But let me tell you that when the ideas work, they change the world. I stand here today as I have in the past and as David and Larry and others have to tell you that the company that you have placed your trust in has so many opportunities ahead of it. We're just at the beginning of the possibility of the technological transformation of the kinds of things that I'm talking about. This trust that you have given us, I hope you agree, is not misplaced. With your help, we're really committed to improving lives on a truly massive, massive global scale.
This would not be possible without your belief in us. I really look forward to a successful future together with all of you. Thank you so much. We're going to, I think we have a video, and then I'm gonna ask David and Larry to join me.
So let's go into the office. All right. So this is our garage. Basically, nobody's in here. Hi.
Hi.
Hi.
I mean, we were all a bunch of kids. We were, you know, we were all somewhat idealistic in our own way.
I did not inhale.
We wanted to do things that made a difference in the world and that, you know, that mattered, right, that were interesting and hard. We didn't start out as a conventional company, and we never followed a normal path.
What is our mission? Basically, we wanna organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
On the one hand, it was a perfect description of what we were trying to accomplish in search, and yet, it was also so broad as to leave the door open for all of the many, many directions we wanted to go in the future.
We set out to do something really useful for people, and all the other things began to fall.
All right. So here we are, one of the elephants.
I don't think any of us possibly could have seen where this story was gonna go.
It may sound nuts, but it's often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious goals than on less risky projects. Few people are crazy enough to try, and those are usually the ones you wanna work with.
What if distance wasn't a barrier to exploring our world?
Can we bring the internet to the five billion people who don't have it today?
如果世界上每一个人会说每一种语言，那会是什么情况？
What if everyone in the world could speak every language?
What if everyone could make a living doing what they love?
Everybody ready?
Down, down, go.
Almost everything we do is an experiment in some way, shape, or form. Everything has some aspect of the unknown.
Oh, that is working on me.
You're probably gonna fail a few times before you succeed.
Now the car is in control.
Google Car in front of us.
We always tend to ask the question, "How can we make it better?" So there's always this sense of optimism and curiosity that you can make a difference.
If our ambition is to create products that have planetary impact, it's not good enough to just solve it. For some people, you have to solve it for absolutely everyone.
The unifying theme, if there is one, is seeing something that doesn't work that well and trying to use technology to make it better.
Wow. I heard it. That is fantastic.
We want to get deeper into the problems that really matter to people and to the world.
Just because we've been successful in the past doesn't mean we're preordained to succeed in the future. It's why we need to keep on asking the big questions and work really hard to find the best answers.
While we're coming up, I neglected to mention that Diane Greene, also a board member, is here. Welcome, Diane. With Sergey. Where is Sergey? Sergey's in the corner. And I think people know Sergey. It's hard to describe what an extraordinary joy it is for me to work with Larry and Sergey. If you ever have an opportunity to work with people who have such a vision and such a sense of what they can accomplish, it's a life-changing experience. So thank you, Larry. Thank you, Sergey, for founding all of this.
I think what we'll do is we'll just, I guess, start with questions. We have microphones here, and they're on any subject you would like, and we would like you to use the microphone. I think since we have Reverend Jesse Jackson here, maybe Reverend, you could start with comments, questions, and take your time.
Very good. I'm gonna express my thanks to you and to David and Larry and Sergey for the opportunity to present to you today, in the annual traditional conference. We wanna be the conscience of the valley, to make the valley more just, more fair, and more inclusive. I spoke to you last year about the need to open up a new era of inclusion for women, African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color in Silicon Valley's technology industry. For those who are left out represent money, market, talent, location, and growth. The untapped genius of America, the unfinished business, is inclusion, which is our moral deficit. Look what a difference a year makes. We've disrupted the tech space and placed racial diversity, gender equality, and inclusion at the forefront of the industries' agenda. We've challenged companies to discard the old model of exclusion.
It's unsustainable, and I will continue to push Google and the rest of Silicon Valley and the tech industry to transform the leadership teams, supplier base, workforce, and business partners to look like America. We've argued the business case for Black and Latino communities and women represents underserved markets, unutilized talent, and untapped capital. Google and the tech industry will do well to embrace, engage, and empower this space of creativity and innovation. You cannot afford not to. Advanced leaders across the country will disrupt the tech industry with a vision, commitment, and courage to help us in a new era of diversity and inclusion. You're unfolding a progressive, diverse strategy, including $150 million in spend for 2015. Your program to embed engineers at Harvard and Hampton and other HBCUs is a great step forward. 37% of Black engineers come from those HBCU schools.
We can't stop there. When Google helped build tech labs to train our youth in coding and building apps, we'll organize, with your support, 1,000 churches that will build tech labs in their churches to teach kids financial literacy, stock market game, apps, and code. We can produce 100,000 every six months with your support. These huge Sunday school departments that empty space for weeks at a time can be a big asset to you and to all of us. Google is stepping up. Intel and others and their $300 million diversity initiative is stepping up. Apple is stepping up. You're all uniquely positioned to lead this new era. But despite your best efforts, an embarrassing outcome yesterday is USA Today. The representation of African Americans and Latinos remain basically static.
Too many technology companies have zero or too few women or people of color in the boardrooms and C-suites and in the workforce. The company cannot look like as a snow-capped mountain white up top and black and brown at the bottom, and so today, we're issuing an open call to companies to again release their EEO-1, the diversity data that you have, by September 1st and provide a one-year report card on the progress they've made on diversity and inclusion. It's time to think big, think bold. Google is creating the driverless cars. You're beaming internet connectivity to the earth from drones in the sky. If you put your mind to it, you can certainly build a pipeline to engage African Americans, Latinos, and people of color to change the face of technology.
You have demonstrated that you can solve the most challenging complex problems in the world, including the complex problem of putting our collective minds so that we can solve that too. May I pose a few questions, Eric, in closing?
Yes, sir.
I more than commend Google for fulfilling the commitment you made last year in releasing your EEO-1 report and diversity data for the second straight year. Thank you for that. You're putting new initiatives and programs into place, but you've not moved the needle on representation very much. What are the challenges that you face, and what can we do to work with you to achieve that purpose? Two, will Google make a commitment to including the Blacks and Latinos on your board of directors, whether it is by expansion or attrition? Specifically, would you agree to consider governance by-law amendment requiring explicit and active search for women and people of color for all board openings? Three, Google reports has over $35 billion parked overseas.
Would you consider repatriating some of this offshore money back to America to fund an innovation investment development bank and in return receive tax credits or a reduced tax rate on foreign profits, and lastly, will Google consider making a major investment to fund early Black and Latino tech startups? Well, thank you again for the opportunity to speak to you today. Let's make Silicon Valley look like America, including leads to growth, and where there's growth, everybody wins. Thank you very much.
Thank you, thank you, Reverend Jackson, and thank you, thank you, for the things that you try to do to make our country a great country. How would you guys? There's a set of questions. I'd like to answer all of them if we can.
Sure. I think we all probably have comments. I should start off by saying thank you, Reverend Jackson, for being here. And I should start off by saying, so we're at a stockholders' meeting, right? And inclusion, diversity, making sure that our businesses look the way our country, our world look, is an important incredibly important thing to do from a human rights standpoint. It's the right thing to do. We're here at a stockholders' meeting, and I can tell you and reiterate that Google's view that this is an incredibly important business issue, right? For to drive stockholder value, one of the things we need to do is to get all the talent and include all the talent at Google and reach out to all the talent. And that's we're very committed to doing that.
You know, we've, we did release the numbers last year. We committed to continuing to have that level of transparency. We did release them this year. And quite frankly, you know, they didn't show in terms of the percentages a big movement. You know, we had an uptick on the number of women in our technology by a percentage point, which was actually significant because we, you know, we have 55,000-plus people. Moving percentage points takes a lot. So we feel there was a little bit some progress there, not nearly enough. With Blacks and Latinos, I can tell you that while the numbers didn't move, the number of Blacks and Latinos at Google is rising at a rate greater than the company as a whole. So we remain in terms of the rate, we're increasing that.
But this is a long struggle, and we know that. We've gotta keep working on this, working on it hard. We wanna continue to work with Rainbow PUSH, other groups. The thing you can do is continue to push us, and we welcome the pressure. We're gonna continue to put pressure on ourselves, to do better.
The reason I bring this is, Dave and Eric, we just went to the balcony in Baltimore. Here's a case with 18,000 vacant homes or abandoned lots. The banks used subprime lending and drove them in a hole. They got bailouted. People locked out and desperate. Unemployment 37%. Police teaching firemen don't live in the city. Result is you have these patches of dry grass and only a match can light it, and the whole nation's riveted by it. There must be some creative plan to induce, to incentivize, because the resources, the TIF money and the tech companies and the bank and the private equity money is on one side of town. We just left Newark yesterday. We had a tech meeting with the mayor and Rutgers University yesterday. In Newark, 144,000 people work there every day, but 18,000 live there. Those who live there don't have transportation, Eric, to where the jobs are. I'm not convinced Washington will solve this.
I think our creativity is in our own interest because those markets are in the parched zone, Larry. Those markets represent untapped market, money, talent, location, growth, and security. And some foreign markets are less lucrative than undeveloped markets at home. And that's the appeal we're trying to make.
And answer a couple other parts of your question just real briefly. On the board question, we have a strong statement in our nominating process. It requires us to seek out broad diversity. Let me note that we have three of our eight independent directors are female. This continues to be an unsolved but important problem. I'll pass your recommendation on. John Hennessy's here. He's the chairman of the nominating committee for further discussion. On the tax question and the repatriation question, there are many good reasons to get the money that's currently trapped overseas into America to invest in America, but we've not been able to move the political conversation on that for many reasons.
Maybe we should do it together. I talked to all the people I talked with, with Lindsey Graham and Schumer and Mrs. Warren. There's several trillion dollars overseas, and there must be some incentive way.
Okay.
To bring the much of the money back for American reconstruction. And we wanna be a part of working out a plan that would be in your enlightened interest to bring a portion of it back. And the government has a role to play relative to tax, security.
Thank you very much, Reverend. Yes, sir.
Good morning. My name is John Simpson. I am a shareholder. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm also the privacy project director for Consumer Watchdog. I have two questions. Both of them relate to your robot cars or driverless cars or autonomous vehicles. What call them what you will. First question. When legislation authorizing driverless cars on public roads was making its way through the California legislature, Google rebuffed an amendment that would've protected privacy by requiring that data gathered by a robot car could be used only for operating the vehicle and not for such things as marketing.
Would you be willing to protect driverless car users' privacy in the future and commit today to using the information gathered by driverless cars only for operating the vehicle and not other purposes such as marketing, without an opt-in, that use by the vehicle's operator?
I can answer this one. Look, I think it's pretty early in the game with driverless cars and the uses that they could be put to to benefit users to be drawing up a lot of rules saying, "Thou shalt not do X, Y, and Z with the data." I think that once we get these operational, the value can be, you know, significant, and I think that, you know, it's a reasonable thing for regulators to look into the uses of data that are developed in driverless cars just like any other activity.
But I think we took the position it's a little early to be drawing, to be making all those kinds of conclusions, which would, in a lot of ways, you know, reduce innovation, and our ability to deliver a great consumer product at the end of the day.
Thank you. Second question. After Consumer Watchdog learned through a Public Records Act request that accident reports involving driverless cars had, in fact, been filed with the Department of Motor Vehicles, Google acknowledged your robot cars have been involved in 11 accidents since testing began. The DMV considers the accident reports confidential. A Google spokesman called the crashes minor and said Google's cars weren't at fault. Of course, that's what any driver says when they're in an accident. "It wasn't my fault." But we have to take your word for it and don't really know what happened because Google hasn't released the actual accident reports, which you could do. Will you release the reports so the public knows what went wrong, and will you commit to making all future accident reports public?
We have Sergey here, too. Do you wanna take him?
Yeah.
Sergey is in charge of this project, so.
Ladies and gentlemen, Sergey Brin, co-founder.
I'm actually quite surprised that you're a shareholder as, you know, Consumer Watchdog has been quite hostile to Google. I'm puzzled by that.
We think that it's important as a public interest group that we speak out on issues that companies are involved in that affect the public interest. You're driving your vehicles and testing them on public roads is a great public interest in what you're doing. And when it goes right, that's wonderful. And when it goes wrong, we wanna know why.
No, no. I think that's all fair. I'm just surprised you're a shareholder. But,
Well, well, why wouldn't I be. Then I get to come and speak and ask you questions. Also, I've made money on this investment, which was all of the good soon.
Sure.
I'll be taking my time off, and I'll fit right in in Silicon Valley. In fact, maybe I'll do that right now.
Sergey, why don't you go ahead and answer his question?
Yeah. I can tell you all about the accidents. We submitted reports to the DMV, which is what the legislature thought was the best course of action. There were about seven or eight times we were rear-ended. Actually, if you want to know, we recently in the past week, we got rear-ended again. Well, we stopped at a light. And there were a few times. There were a couple times, I think, actually once, when one of our drivers was driving the car and accidentally rear-ended somebody. I guess our biggest learning from the accidents has been that people, you know, don't pay attention, even trained drivers. The one time when it was our driver at fault was many years ago, and we've since had a lot of training for our drivers. If you're interested in the accident reports, I mean, I can tell you. Oh, I should note also I can't remember the other three or so, but there were situations when the car was not driving itself, and we were hit. I forget, like, at a stoplight, somebody ran it, and we were sideswiped, a few things of that nature. Look, I'm very proud of the record of our cars.
We by the way, we don't claim that cars are going to be perfect. Our goal is to beat human drivers, and nothing can be a perfect vehicle. I just wanna set that expectation. I'm very pleased that we've done as well as we have, and I think it's because we have really good safety protocols and really good safety drivers. To your question about the DMV reports, you know, the DMV wished us to submit those reports to them in the private manner. If we were to disclose them, I can tell you what they say. I mean, they say, you know, "So-and-so, Mr. John Smith, rear-ended the car at such-and-such an intersection." We don't wanna release those details of those because that is a privacy issue. They mention, you know, to.
What do you mean the person's name is a privacy issue?
The person's name, the car make and model, things like that.
I could see redacting a person's name, but I mean, the details of the car.
That's true. But, the rest.
Well, our.
I can tell you what the form looks like. It is the details of, you know, person A, person B, who is the Google safety driver, and then it's a description, which, you know, we write what happened, like, "We got rear-ended." I mean, it's basically the summary we've already given you. I suppose we could give more detail and we're open to that, but it's, you're not going to learn anymore. I mean, it is still you're saying you're taking our word for it. We have many responsibilities to be truthful, to the press and our statements to the DMV and so forth. That's not going to change, but the reports you're asking for basically say what we have already summarized plus private information of individuals. There's nothing else in them.
Maybe you could finish up, and we need to move to our next question.
Thank you very much.
Sure. Okay. Thank you, Sergey. 31,000 people are killed on American highways every year. Anything we can do to reduce that is a life saved. Yes, ma'am.
Hi. My name is Danielle Ginach here from Sonen Capital. I have a quick comment just specifically building on to Reverend Jackson's comments, and thank you so much for those. I just wanted to actually commend the board specifically on its diversity. Clearly, there's more work to be done throughout the organization, but as investors dedicated to investing in those companies that show leadership on social and environmental best practices, we wanted to call attention to Google's actions and leadership. So investors are aware that these issues have increased and come under increasing scrutiny over the last few years regarding composition and diversity of boards. Leading investors such as Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, Warren Buffett have spoken out saying that these really need to be we need to see improving female and ethnic representation on the boards.
The 30% Coalition is another group comprised of investors, policymakers, and NGOs are all actively pressuring companies with zero or limited board diversity to make an urgent commitment to increasing this diversity, and adopting a standard, and I think, you know, as the Reverend's comment stated, this is kind of getting beyond the right thing to do and something that shows increased performance from a financial standpoint, instances of decreased corruption, decreased fraud, so something we're very pleased to see as shareholders, so I wanted to make a comment commending the board and commending Google for showing leadership in that area.
Thank you very much. In the way back?
Oh.
No, sorry. Ma'am, the lady behind you.
Sorry. Okay.
Okay.
Good morning. Again, my name is Abigail Shaw from NorthStar Asset Management in Boston. I'd like to take this opportunity to commend Google for its good work on and commitment to renewable energy. The final two shareholder proposals on today's docket seem to disagree with what is quickly becoming a fundamental truth. Action in favor of the environment is good business. The New York Times recently wrote that clean energy is catching up with conventional energy in terms of cost, reporting that the cost of utility-scale solar energy is as low as $0.056 a kilowatt-hour, and wind is as low as $0.014. In comparison, natural gas comes at $0.061 a kilowatt-hour on the low end and coal at $0.066. To give you context, the average price for electricity in the U.S. is about $0.12 per kilowatt-hour.
In choosing clean energy solutions for company power usage and through investment in companies like SolarCity, not only does Google take important steps forward for the environment by reducing the company's reliance on fossil-fuel-based energy, but it also keeps the financial bottom line in mind. Further, supporting climate change policy is a smart way to safeguard the company's investments. As clean energy becomes more popular, more easily dispatchable, and decreases in cost on a more widespread scale as innovations continue, Google can be at the forefront of this financial and environmental movement. Google clearly understands the importance of committing to cleaner energy. It is both good for business and good for the future of our world. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you very much. The gentleman in the back.
Thank you. I just wanted to say.
Oh, sir.
That we have, not an investment in SolarCity, but a deal with them to fund residential installations. But everything else is correct, I think.
Gentleman in the back.
Good morning. Question for Larry. We learned recently about the forthcoming Android Pay. We learned, I think it was in April, about the fact that Google Wallet funds were going to be or are FDIC insured. Just curious about your views about the future of financial services, the next generation of financial services, what regulatory hurdles you see as it relates to the strategic plans with Google?
I've been working on payments on phones for a long time. It's something we've been excited about. So I've been paying for a while with my phone, using Google Wallet and now Android Pay. I think it's a pretty great experience. I mean, people, we didn't show it in the video, but it could have been in the video. You know, first time you pay with a phone, and you don't have to pull out your card and mess with entering codes and signing things and so on. It's a pretty great experience. And so we're excited about that. I think we've made a great announcement in I/O last week. We're in partnership with many different financial institutions and banks and so on.
But I think primarily just getting that, you know, amazing experience where payments become something you don't have to mess around with, but becomes really easy is a big deal. We're really excited about that.
Okay. Yes, ma'am.
My name is Suzanne Castle. I have essential familial tremor, so I must thank you for the eating tool. I would like it to have a knife, please. I attended a lecture by Ray Kurzweil last year, and he had just been hired by you at the age of 64, to head your AI, as I understood it, and I wondered if you had any comments on that.
Yeah. So on Ray and AI in general, I think this is an area Eric talked a little bit about machine learning and how it's made many of our products much better. I think we think this is a very important area, and it's been quite amazing, I think, what computers have been able to do, in translation, in search, in understanding photos, which we just released this week last week as well. So I think we're at quite the early stages of that, in terms of empowering everyone in the world to get things that they want to do done, by using computers to do a lot of that work. Ray is certainly a, you know, a great speaker on this topic and great thinker.
We have many other people in the company as well who are hard at work on those things, and I'm, you know, I'm very excited about that.
Good. Thank you. Just one thing for you, Eric. I live by something I heard Mr. Dr. Land say. He said he invented the Polaroid camera because he went out with his little girl one day and took a photograph, and she said, "Let me see it, Daddy." And he said, "You can't see it." And he went home and invented the Polaroid camera.
Mm-hmm.
Asking the question is the big deal.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you.
Thank you so much. The gentleman in the back.
Hi. My name is Eugene Cho. I just, well, I went to undergrad at Berkeley. I just graduated from law school at Berkeley, studying for the bar. Decided to take a day off to come down because I've been a shareholder since undergrad and never made it to a shareholder meeting. So,
So welcome.
Yeah. Thank you, but you know, going to law school has really made me. It's taught me a healthy fear of the future. And basically, I think back to my undergrad days when I bought Google shares, which was around the time of the IPO. So as a shrewd investor, I invested at the apex of the price right after the IPO. And when I think about that, it's because there was a real sense of imagination, I think. There was and it's something I don't have anymore because of law school, but you know.
Go ahead. A real one, Eugene. Don't, don't give up yet, Eugene. It's still possible to have imagination. Trust me. Trust me.
There's a subset of lawyers that work here that have a lot of imagination.
I mean, 26 years out, it's still possible.
Oh, I hope so.
We're okay.
But the bar is not really getting me in that mood anymore. When I think about, like, in undergrad, there's some sort of sense of imagination of what Google is gonna do, you know. I also grew up with a lot of dystopian sci-fi movies, the worst of which, of course, is Wall-E. In Wall-E, there's this future imagined where everybody's super obese, and they're sitting in chairs all day, and they're looking at screens, and they don't talk to anybody. I think about Google in the sense of, I'm, you know, organizing the world's information. However, to me, it's also reaching into all these other areas, not just organizing the existing information, but finding information and creating it and sort of dataizing it and informationizing it.
I'm wondering, like, from a philosophical point of view, what, when is Google's mission done, and what will that look like? Will it be Wall-E or The Matrix or something horrible like that? Or, you know, I, I'd like to believe in the sort of awesome videos from, like, Google Glass and stuff. But I was wondering what if you've ever sat down and thought, you know, at the end of the day, like, 50, 100, 1,000 years in the future, what will Google have created?
Wow. That's quite a question. Actually, just last week, went to Tomorrowland, which is a science fiction Disney movie that's trying to portray the future positively and fails both. I guess the critical response has not been very good. So I think there's a problem, and the reason I went to the movie is that I was interested in a version of the future that would be positive, 'cause that's so seldom portrayed in science fiction or movies or whatever. I guess I came away from that and just said it's not a very good story 'cause it's not dark.
So I think there is a real bias, and I think there's a real bias towards it's much easier to focus on the negative, and you know, stoke up fear and all the things that could go wrong with something you don't know what it is yet. And so I think it's very hard to find positive views of the future in general. And I think that's been true for a long time. So don't let that get you down. You know, any measure you make of the world, it's getting better. Poverty, empowerment, all the issues that Reverend Jackson talked about, everything's getting better in general, by quite a bit. So I think we should be optimists and be excited about all the things that we're building and contributing to the world 'cause I think generally it's working.
Thank you. Thank you. We've run over, but I wanna make sure we get a few final questions. Yes, sir. Go ahead.
Me?
Yes. Go ahead.
Shelton Ehrlich. Some of the things you described today, you're in competition with Apple. So I'd like to know how you compare yourself with Apple in some of those aspects. But first, I'd like to say something about shareholder proposals. One of the proposals today, I commended you for getting out of ALEC. And in the proxy statement, it was described as an organization that writes model legislation as if ALEC were the only one. I'm part of an organization that has 100,000 volunteer regulation writers. If you look up and see the sprinkler system, if you see the TV and the electricity we've got, one's, they're both part of something called the National Fire Protection Association. I worked on model legislation for 20 years. Mine dealt with boiler explosions.
There are lots of organizations that prepare what we have to call model legislation that aren't in politics. So my question is, where do you stand with against Apple in some of these ventures?
My description is pretty simple. Apple is both a partner and a competitor. Apple and Google today have a huge business around search, which is very important for both companies. We also compete in the toughest competition, I think, that there's ever been in the computer industry, which is in the mobile phone space. The incredible improvements that you're seeing in smartphones in terms of capability, apps, and so forth, in my view, are a result of that brutal capitalistic competition, which has driven prices down.
I can't speak for Apple, obviously, but I can tell you that over the next year, we have profoundly better versions at every price point from every manufacturer, including something very strategic, something called Android One, which we're pushing down sub-$100 phones for the developing world, which really does achieve the objective that we've set out of total inclusiveness from the standpoint of access to information. Yes, sir. Let's move it along. Thank you.
Yeah. Hi. I'm Dan Gluesenkamp. I'm the executive director of the California Native Plant Society. For 50 years, we've been trying to understand and organize, to some degree, the most chaotic and disorganized data set, one of the most organized disorganized data sets on planet Earth, the biodiversity of California. It's a biodiversity hotspot, millions of years of evolution, environmental conditions, adaptations, tools, chemicals, all encoded in the DNA of the organisms that live here. Our mission is to primarily protect that, and to do that, we need to understand it. I wanted to just ask for more assistance on that. There's a couple of avenues. One, we have a tremendous opportunity. Biodiversity conservation is an enterprise ripe for disruption using Stone Age techniques. Really, a lot of the difficult challenges we face are entirely soluble.
They're just not solvable by grassroots people working with abacuses. And Rebecca Moore has helped us a lot and is a great, great representative for Google, and we need more investment in that. And then secondly, there are some unintended consequences of actions that, by looking at biodiversity conservation, which is really closely allied with what you guys are doing, it's about data to a large degree, you can avoid some. The BrightSource project at Ivanpah led to some great destruction of some real nice biodiversity resources and ultimately did not produce too much electricity. So these large-scale industrial energy developments in the desert and elsewhere, I would encourage you to work more closely on distributed solar on rooftops than these large inefficient subsidy-based ones. And then secondly, we have some things coming down the pipe. This is my last comment.
like the self-driving cars, hold the possibility that people will be able to live further from their workplace and enjoy their commute, enjoy a shorter commute over longer distances while they get work done. And the danger there for folks like me, folks who care about conserving the truly wild places, is that there will be development pressure on those for folks who would like to live up in the Sierra and commute down to their job and.
There's an old rule about commuting that commutes average 30 minutes, independent of any other fact.
Yeah.
It's been scientifically proven.
My request to you would be.
Can you finish up your question?
Absolutely. The solution to that is to analyze our conservation priorities in California, collect data, figure out where the high biodiversity hotspots are, put together conservation plans for that. To fund that, we could use a vehicle license fee for self-driving vehicles. $5 each would produce a tremendous fund to do that work, develop the information, proactively conserve the places. I'd like you to consider it.
Thank you for your suggestion. Google has funded a very large set of biologic analysis tools, including genetic databases, now for flora and fauna, which I helped introduce, a month ago. We're very, very proud of our contribution in understanding the nature of life at a botanical level. And that's a first start along the path that you've described.
We're very thankful for the tools you've given.
Yes, sir. First of all, I really wanted to thank you for all the great stuff you're doing. My question is, are ad blockers and how you see that affecting your revenue source 'cause that's the primary Google's primary revenue. Maybe a little bit broader is how it seems like the ad-based model is wonderful for the internet in allowing, you know, so great ideas to go forward. And if you see that changing or what you see happening there.
Yeah. I mean, we've been dealing with ad blocking for a long time. There's been a number of different products and so on to do that. So I think part of it is the industry needs to get better at producing ads that are less annoying, and that are quicker to load and all those things. And I think we can do a better job of that as an industry. And we've been kind of trying to pioneer that. I think search ads are very good in that sense. And in fact, a lot of places where ads get blocked, search ads do not get blocked 'cause they're actually useful. So that's, I think, a really good example of what we should be trying to do. But I don't think there's been any major change in that dynamic, you know, in the last year or anything like that.
Okay. Thank you. The gentleman in the back will have the second to last question, and, Madam, you'll have the honor of the last question. So, gentlemen.
Thank you. My name's James Ventries. I'm from Southern California. I got real excited years ago when Google first came on the market. This business of Don't be evil with the technical education I have, I thought, "Wow, gee, maybe a technical guy can even have a heart and do good things in his soul." And so as I was flying up here, I sort of was asking myself, "Why am I going? And what is my mind doing?" And I thought, "Well, I'll throw something in that I think might be in concert with if I had the privilege of working here, I'd like to work on. I'd like to see a product, an app or musical or movie, called Muslim Hug. And it just cuts right into what I think is a struggle between Sunnis and Shiites.
If we could all understand that and like a Muslim, I feel like I look over my shoulder and I go to the market if somebody's wearing a headscarf. And I, I shouldn't have those feelings. I don't know if a spiritual improvement product is can be affected through technology, but if anybody can do it, my company can do it. Thank you.
Wow. I mean, I don't know if it's how easy it'll be to develop a spiritual improvement product. But you know, then going to the example you used of sort of, you know, Muslim, Shiite, Sunnis, you know, one of the things and obviously this is a topic of great, you know, there's a lot of conflict going on in the world between Muslims, you know, between the Muslim world and the West and so forth.
One of the things we've been working on is to look at our platforms, things like YouTube, and make them more available to people as a way of you know developing more dialogue you know when there's negative speech, when there's hateful speech, when there's speech that's promoting hurting other people, that people are empowered to speak out against that, right, and start the dialogue about, "Well, why, you know, we have commonalities. We should be emphasizing those." And I think there's a lot of internet technologies that can be used for that, to counter people who are using it to spread you know strife and division and so forth. So we're actually spending a fair amount of time on those kinds of issues. So hopefully that's down the road of the very innovative app that you're suggesting. Thank you.
Yes, ma'am, you'll have the final question.
Thank you. My name is Jean Boyden. I'm a stockholder, and I really liked Eric's opening comment about asking hard questions. I have a granddaughter with autism. She's not quite five years old. She does not speak now and probably never will, although she probably will learn to write. Most people communicate more verbally than in writing. My question is, how can she talk to the world? Thank you.
A very profound question. We're doing a lot of thinking about how to approach these medical problems. The autism one has been the subject of a great deal of scientific work because it has a genetic basis in some situations. So there's a whole bunch of programs that are very advanced, and a number of them are using Google's genetics platforms to do this kind of research. Any other comments?
No, man. Thank everyone for coming.
Well, I would.
David?
I would just one as a father of a 14-year-old nonverbal, autistic son. I can tell you that we, we've been trying to spend a fair amount of time on this. One of the in Google.org, which is our philanthropic arm, our theme for this year is disabilities. Cognitive disabilities is one of the things that we're spending time on. So we wanna invest in organizations that are building new technologies to help people with cognitive disabilities, including autism, to learn better. It turns out there's a lot of ways we can figure out new interfaces for people to communicate. I know firsthand that people with autism and other such disabilities do communicate. They wanna communicate, and it's up to us to figure out some great technologies to help them do it.