Google is in the middle of a legal storm as one judge already labelled it as a monopoly recently, while another has now said that the company committed a “clear abuse of privilege” by implementing a policy that automatically deleted employee chat records.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema who is overseeing a Justice Department antitrust trial targeting its alleged digital advertising monopoly is hearing arguments to consider the DOJ’s motion for an “adverse inference” finding against the company which deleted records it was ordered to preserve. If granted, it would allow the court to assume that Google intentionally acted to destroy evidence that is relevant to the case.
The motion centres on a policy outlined in a 2008 memo from Google’s chief legal officer Kent Walker, who advised employees to turn off their chat history by default. As a result, employee messages were automatically deleted after 24 hours.
“I certainly do not mind saying [this] is not the way in which a responsible corporate entity should function,” Brinkema said Tuesday, according to a transcript obtained by AdWeek. “A clear abuse of privilege.”
Google faces a potential breakup of its digital advertising technology business that yielded more than $300 billion (A$441.36 billion) in revenue last year alone.
Google (Image: Sourced from Unsplash)
The non-jury adtech case begins on September 9. Brinkema, who will preside over the case, said the Walker memo contained “incredible smoking guns.”
“An awful lot of evidence has likely been destroyed,” Brinkema added.
In a separate trial, another US judge found that Google illegally monopolized the search market through exclusive deals to crush its rivals. Judge Amit Mehta in Washington ruled that Google was a monopolist. In that case brought against the company by the Justice Department and a group of states, the government is pushing for “structural relief” – which could possibly mean the breakup of Google. It could end up being the biggest forced breakup of a US company since AT&T was dismantled in 1984. A separate remedy trial will determine the penalties that Google faces in that case.
Like Brinkema, Mehta too has addressed Google’s failure of preserving memos and internal records. While Mehta did not sanction Google for misconduct related to the destroyed records during that trial, he referred to the company’s handling of evidence as “negligent.”’
“The court’s decision not to sanction Google should not be understood as condoning Google’s failure to preserve chat evidence,” Mehta said. “Any company that puts the onus on its employees to identify and preserve relevant evidence does so at its own peril.”
