Nov 20, 2024 10:14 PM IST
Google avoided antitrust scrutiny for years by urging staff to delete texts, avoid incriminating terms, and involve the company’s lawyer in communications.
Search engine giant Google adopted various strategies over 15 years to avoid legal scrutiny over anti-trust issues, a New York Times report has claimed.
The company, facing legal anti-trust lawsuits in the United States, reportedly told employees to destroy evidence of their text messages, avoid using certain words in internal communication that could later serve as legal evidence and often copy lawyers as soon as possible.
HT cannot independently verify this information.
Alphabet-owned Google has been deploying such strategies since 2008, when the company was under legal scrutiny over an advertising deal with its then-rival Yahoo, the report said.
The company’s executive is said to have sent a confidential memo cautioning employees that regulators might seize on words casually used or thoughtlessly written to one another. The employees were also asked to “think twice” before writing on “hot topics”.
Also read: Google says selling Chrome or Android would ‘break them’ in response to DOJ
Government regulations in the US mandate that companies anticipating legal action preserve their documents. But Google’s technology for its internal communication was reportedly tweaked to make deletion default and it was left to individual employees facing legal action to decide on having their chat history on.
In an internal memo from 2011, Google recommended employees to avoid “metaphors involving wars or sports, winning or losing,” and rejecting references to “markets,” “market share” or “dominance”. Phrases like “putting products in the hands of new customers” was also asked to be avoided as regulators might interpret the term to accuse the company of denying consumers a “choice”, the NYT report added.
Several testimonies in anti-trust cases prove that Google also took other steps to maintain a tight lid on its internal communications.
According to the NYT report, Google employees were encouraged to mark “attorney-client privileged” on documents and always add the company’s lawyer to the list of recipients, even when a specific internal communication did not involve legal issues.
In Google vs Epic Games case, a district court judge in California observed that the search giant “ingrained systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence” and it was “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice,” the report said.
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In another case involving the company’s advertising technology, a district court judge in Virginia remarked that Google’s document retention policies were designed in a way that an “awful lot of evidence has likely been destroyed”.
In a case brought by the US Justice Department against Google’s search engine dominance, a Columbia district court reviewed documents withheld by the company as privileged and concluded that it did not deserve to be deemed privileged after all.
What Google said?
The company in a statement said it took obligations to preserve and produce relevant documents seriously. “We have for years responded to inquiries and litigation, and we educate our employees about legal privilege,” it added.
Agnieszka McPeak, a professor at Gonzaga University School of Law, told The New York Times that Google’s internal practices created an illusion of deceit that the company tried so hard to hide.
“Google had a top-down corporate policy of ‘Don’t save anything that could possibly make us look bad. And that makes Google look bad. If they’ve got nothing to hide, people think, why are they acting like they do?,” McPeak added.
Also read: Google’s AI chatbot Gemini verbally abuses student, tells him ‘Please die’
The company’s lawyer testified in the Epic Games trial that a Google employee on average wrote 13 times more emails compared to an employee from other companies and changes were made to its policies to avoid things becoming “worse”.
In the Epic case, the company was accused of misusing the “attorney-client” privilege merely to keep documents away from legal scrutiny. Google denied that it was practiced to encourage a “culture of concealment” and claimed that its employees were “unsure” of the meaning of certain words.
Google also asserted that it did its best to provide the government with documents needed and the Justice Department failed to establish that “deleted” conversations were crucial to prove its case. The department hit back claiming it could not because the material had been “deleted”.
The NYT report notes that Google allegedly changed its procedures once again amid mounting legal scrutiny. The company has started saving everything, including chats and employees under litigation cannot turn off their chat history.
The company’s employees responded to the news by forming a group on WhatsApp, Meta’s end to end encrypted messaging app!
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