Its a big problem these funds that are essentially custodians are taking their customers voting power to break corporations to their will. Needs to be legislation that curbs this as many others have been saying.
I'm tempted to say "they're the owners, that means they have the votes."
Which is true. And "many others" is a vapid, meaningless phrase.
However, proxies are voted in accordance with the "recommendations" of a very few advisory firms. That means that if you buy 10 million dollars worth of ETFs, all of those many, many shares are voted without your input. I'd certainly support legislation to give the "final" owners of those shares the right to vote the proxies themselves.
Now, if Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, and all the pension funds got together, that might add up to something.
[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/market_cap