Google earlier this month reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2012, topping Wall Street’s estimates. The Internet giant also announced plans to create a new class of non-voting capital stock that would effectively create a 2-for-1 stock split. As a result, Google would be able to issue new shares of stock for acquisitions and employee compensation without diluting the 56.3% voting stake the company’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin control. Not everyone is happy about the planned split, however, and a shareholder has sued the company and its board in an attempt to block the plan. The class action lawsuit is being put forward by the Brockton Retirement Board, which has accused Google of breaching its fiduciary duty to the company’s shareholders, Reuters reported on Monday. The complaint states that Page and Brin “wish to retain this power, while selling off large amounts of their stockholdings, and reaping billions of dollars in proceeds.” The Brockton Retirement Board asked a Delaware judge to block the plan and award unspecified compensatory damages.

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin said during an interview published on Sunday that Apple and Facebook pose serious threats to Internet freedom because of their closed approaches to software. While speaking with The Guardian, Brin said there are ”very powerful forces that have lined up against the open Internet on all sides and around the world. I am more worried than I have been in the past. It’s scary.” The executive pointed to the “walled-garden” philosophy that sees companies like Apple and Facebook maintain tight control over third-party software on their respective platforms as the cause for his concerns. Read on for more.

Brin voiced concerns that this closed approach prevents companies like Google from accessing the information stored on the companies’ networks, possibly revealing one of the main causes for his position. ”There’s a lot to be lost,” Brin said. “For example, all the information in apps, that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it.”

The Google co-founder acknowledged that there are much more serious threats to freedom on the Web than his company’s two nearest rivals, however — namely the efforts of countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict access to the Internet. Brin also noted that the entertainment industry’s anti-piracy efforts stand to impede Internet freedom.

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If ever there were two contemporary corporate giants worthy of the title “game changer”, Google Co-Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page fit the bill. Those interested in the story that started as a research project at Stanford University in 1996 and exploded into the behemoth Internet (and beyond) company we know, love and fear today, Bloomberg Television has you covered. Bloomberg TV’s original 11-part documentary series “Bloomberg Game Changers” will cover the two Googlers this Thursday at 9:00 pm ET in an hour-long special that includes interviews with Brin and Page’s college professors as well as Google’s first employee, Craig Silverstein. Hit the jump for a video preview and then set your DVR boxes post haste.

Regardless of how large, powerful and influential a company is, no one is recession-proof. Internet search giant Google has been laying off employees since this summer, and it has been doing so under the news radar for the most part. The SEC requires companies to disclose information regarding layoffs but apparently Google had slipped around the rule and reported its Q3 earnings as expected by saying it had cut down on “operational expenses”. Though Google officially has 20,123 employees, there are an additional 10,000 which are just labeled as temporary operational expenses. However it wants to label those human beings, they are still going to get shafted and are still going to be hurt by this massive cut in manpower. Google’s very own Sergey Brin says, “There is no question that the number (of workers) is too high”.

Though some of these employees are temporary, they have faithfully been employed by Google for several years. The method in which it has kept temporary status and slipped under the SEC radar is by constantly moving employees around to different jobs every so often, thus retaining the temporary employee label and holding on to the bodies nonetheless. They are full time employees without full time benefits. While it’s unfortunate that many of these employees are being let go, they did last longer and enjoy more benefits (Google’s facilities) than most temps do. Times are getting tough and it shows – that’s actually water, not the usual Cristal, in Brin and Page’s hot tub.

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