Felix Salmon has a much better write up of why it's bad: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/04/13/googles-evil-stock-split/ http://blogs.reuters.com/fe

Felix Salmon has a much better write up of why it's bad: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/04/13/googles-evil-stock-split/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/04/13/googles-evi... Quoting at length: Dual-class voting shares were illegal for most of the 20th Century, but came back in 1986. James Sterngold’s NYT story on their reintroduction is well worth a read, featuring as it does comments against the new rules from both Felix Rohatyn (”The one-share, one-vote rule is pretty fundamental to the market”) and T Boone Pickens (”Let’s face it, managements want this because they want to entrench themselves. They went to Congress to get protection and they didn’t get it. So they went to the exchange to get protection, and they got it.”) Even then, however, there were safeguards, including the crucial one that a majority of independent shareholders — excluding management and some directors — had to approve the move... Google has, now, clearly violated the spirit of the NYSE rules, if not their letter. It took 15 months for the independent directors on the board to be persuaded of this, in long and secret deliberations