US Court Sanctions Google For Deleting Evidence In Antitrust Cases (reuters.com) 27
Alphabet's Google LLC intentionally destroyed employee "chat" evidence in antitrust litigation in California and must pay sanctions and face a possible penalty at trial, a U.S. judge ruled on Tuesday. Reuters reports: U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco said in his order (PDF) that Google "fell strikingly short" in its duties to preserve records. The ruling is part of a multidistrict litigation that includes a consumer class action with as many as 21 million residents; 38 states and the District of Columbia; and companies including Epic Games Inc and Match Group LLC. The consumers and other plaintiffs are challenging Google's alleged monopoly for distributing Android mobile applications, allegations that Google has denied. Plaintiffs have claimed aggregate damages of $4.7 billion.
The judge asked the plaintiffs' lawyers by April 21 to provide an amount in legal fees they are seeking as a sanction. Separately, the plaintiffs will have a chance to urge Donato to tell jurors that Google destroyed information that was unfavorable to it. He said he wants to see "the state of play" at a later stage in the case. "Google has tried to downplay the problem and displayed a dismissive attitude ill tuned to the gravity of its conduct," the judge said.
The judge asked the plaintiffs' lawyers by April 21 to provide an amount in legal fees they are seeking as a sanction. Separately, the plaintiffs will have a chance to urge Donato to tell jurors that Google destroyed information that was unfavorable to it. He said he wants to see "the state of play" at a later stage in the case. "Google has tried to downplay the problem and displayed a dismissive attitude ill tuned to the gravity of its conduct," the judge said.
Punitive damages time (Score:4)
Three times what is being asked for. Even Google might notice losing $12bn
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For people who don't understand the accounting term: Gross Income is the money the company gets before removing anything for taxes, salaries, rent, or any other costs associated with running the company.
Should I remember properly in 2021 Google had a income over US$250 Billion, meaning they would be fined over US$50 Billion dollars for destroying evidence. That'll leave a mark, and probably result
"Oh, you mean *that* kind of deletion." (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems Google used screwy word-play to try to wiggle out of it. Corporations sure like to test their limits. Hyper-competitive people often can't resist the urge to play at knife's edge.
McAfee once spent lots of pretzel word-play to try to wiggle out of an auto-pay hiccup that swiped my cash. (Avoid pull-based auto-pay at ANY cost!)
Either that, Google needed an excuse to delete something very damning and decided to pay the deletion non-compliance fee rather than the damning evidence being found out.
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More likely, Google fucked up due to poor management practices while being under a legal hold, and reverted to the legal version of a 10 year old making up literally any excuse for not getting in trouble.
Standard practice really.
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Indeed. Seems they finally have run into a judge that will not tolerate it. May well make them loose the case in addition to a huge fine. Well deserved if you ask me.
Don't be evil.... (Score:2)
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Sigh. My moderator points ran out yesterday. +1 insightful...
One way to stop this behavior (Score:4, Insightful)
Locate the accounts that were deleted. Put the people associated with the accounts in jail, without bail, for contempt of court, with the cases to be heard following the current case. When people have to face actual consequences for their actions, not just pay a corporate fine, their actions will change.
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There are no contempt charges because there was no contempt because there was no court order to be in contempt of. What they did was violate the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which state that if you are involved (or are about to be involved) in litigation you must take steps to preserve electronic communications so they are available to the opposing party in discovery. The penalty for failing to take those steps is exactly what has happened here: you may have to pay associated costs. Furthermore, if
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The executives, and others involved, can't get off easy here. Executives in particular need to be held accountable. After all we're told they're so important to running the company... they deserve all their compensation because they're integral to it's operations... that they are indispensable for the day to day decisions... that they're always on-call making decisions. That's cool. Enjoy a fine worth 20% of your overall compensation package. That's the EN
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It is a civil case, nobody is going to jail. There is no contempt of court charge as there was no court order.
But.. but .. the servers automatically deleted it (Score:2)
It's not like there was a person at Google that pushed the delete button.
Re:But.. but .. the servers automatically deleted (Score:5, Interesting)
At a former company a VP asked our IT department to set the email retention policy to 30 days. IT just pretended it was not an option of the email platform we used (it was definitely an option). This would have made working much much harder since most internal communication was email at the time. The reason for the request was 100% anti discovery as they had evidence they wanted to hide in case of such discovery requests, including from potential buyers.
I've learned to avoid companies where the executives cannot be trusted.
Come to think of it I think I was still working at Google when they defaulted the chat history to off. That was a discovery prevention move, obviously, since there was no reason that it could improve employee productivity. The Moto was still "Don't be evil" at the time, but it was clearly only used as a marketing/hiring ploy by then.
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I've learned to avoid companies where the executives cannot be trusted.
Where the @#$% do you work now? Are they hiring?
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At a startup for over 4y, I still trust the cofounders after all that time. I did ask a lot of questions and even met with the seed VC before accepting an offer. Unfortunately we are not hiring at the moment.
If you are really curious you can find my profile and the company on LinkedIn where I have the same username.
Wrong approach. (Score:2)
The only approach that will prevent other companies from deleting evidence would be to render a default guilty verdict for each antitrust case.
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No. What needs to happen is fines and possibly jail time for management. Even that won't stop all the others, but it will make them be a lot more careful.
Jail time for Google executives (Score:4, Insightful)
"Google has tried to downplay the problem and displayed a dismissive attitude ill tuned to the gravity of its conduct," the judge said.
Putting a few Google executives in jail for a week would very quickly correct this attitude.
Right not, no matter how much Google got fined, it will be just business cost that might make a tiny chip into their annual profits.
Re:Jail time for Google executives (Score:4, Interesting)
Spot on, if the 'gravity' is that the shareholder profits will be docked by less than the janitorial costs of cleaning the Google offices, there is no gravity to speak of. Maybe the judge could apply RICO to make the gravity more palpable by these execs.
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Maybe the judge could apply RICO
Sigh. It's not RICO. Please forget you ever heard that word. https://www.popehat.com/2016/0... [popehat.com]
Re:Jail time for Google executives (Score:4, Insightful)
Appreciate the sentiment, but I prefer a legal system with defined and predictable outcomes rather than kneejerk punishment of the person we think is deserving of it right now. And by that I mean, let's codify in law that executives are directly accountable with possible jail time for such things rather than making things up as we go.
Money isn't a sanction (Score:1)
Curious it is about google, not apple (Score:3, Interesting)
Claim against apple's monopoly is understandable, as its app store is exclusive.
Android, on the other hand, allows to side load apps, install multiple app stores and what not. So what is there to claim "monopoly" on.
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The issue at hand here is Google's avoidance of discovery, not the underlying claims for the monopoly lawsuit. This is about Google's conduct in response to the lawsuit. There are other lawsuits, notably by Epic, against Apple. Of course, you could do a bit of research on this lawsuit to understand the plaintiff's claims of 'monopoly' and related abuse. It's pretty easy to find summaries of the lawsuit, and you can use Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo (for example) to find out.
How you feel about the underlyi