Google will face a showdown with shareholders today over its conduct in China and other territories that censor the web at the internet giant’s annual meeting.

The Office of the Comptroller of New York City, which controls police, fire department and teachers’ pension funds, has demanded a shareholder vote calling for measures designed to safeguard free speech online.

The vote will include a call for Google not to store information that can identify its users in “internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system”.

Google, together with other US internet companies, has met with fierce criticism after it emerged that the group's Chinese site blocked search queries pertaining to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

Other policies being proposed at the shareholder meeting ask that Google does not engage in "proactive censorship" and that it uses all legal means to resist demands for censorship.

The Google board has recommended a vote against the shareholder proposal.

Since two thirds of Google’s voting stock is owned by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, its co-founders, and Eric Schmidt, the chief executive, who sit on the board, the proposal has no chance of being passed.

However, last June Google acknowledged for the first time that it compromised its principles when it entered the Chinese market and agreed to toe Beijing’s strict line on censorship.

Mr Brin said that the company, which operates under the motto "do no evil", had adopted "a set of rules that we weren’t comfortable with".

Today's annual meeting follows impressive quarterly results from Google in which the leader in search-based online advertising posted $1 billion in profits.

Since the company went public, it has beat Wall Street's financial expectations in 11 of 12 quarters.

The shareholder vote comes as US internet companies face greater scrutiny over their conduct in China.

Last month a Chinese political prisoner sued Yahoo!, a rival to Google, in a US federal court, accusing the internet company of helping the Chinese Government to torture him by providing information that led to his arrest.

The lawsuit, filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act, is believed to be the first of its kind made against an American internet company.

Wang Xiaoning, who is serving a ten-year sentence in China, and his wife, Yu Ling, who is in San Francisco, are seeking damages and an injunction barring Yahoo! from identifying political opponents to the Chinese authorities.

Mr Wang was arrested after distributing online articles calling for democratic reform and a multiparty system in China via Yahoo! sites in 2000 and 2001.

His suit contends that Yahoo!’s Hong Kong office provided police in China with information that linked him to the postings.

Mr Wang was arrested in September 2002 and says that he was beaten while in detention.

A Yahoo! spokesman said last month that the company “is distressed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the internet", but said that it had not had time to review Mr Wang's lawsuit.

Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Cisco have all faced fierce criticism for doing business in China, a state dubbed "the world champion of internet censorship" by Reporters Without Borders, the press freedom group.

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