Alphabet Inc.’s Google flouted a court order requiring it to save records of employee chats in antitrust litigation over its Google Play app store policies, a federal judge concluded.
(Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc.’s Google flouted a court order requiring it to save records of employee chats in antitrust litigation over its Google Play app store policies, a federal judge concluded.
Google gave almost 360 employees “carte blanche” not to preserve communications as potential evidence that may be crucial to the company’s complex antitrust fight with Epic Games Inc. and a coalition of state attorneys general, US District Judge James Donato in San Francisco said in a ruling on Tuesday. “In effect, Google adopted a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy for chat preservation, at the expense of its preservation duties,” he said.
Donato said he’d hold further proceedings to figure out an appropriate non-monetary penalty against Google for its conduct and whether to make the company reimburse its adversaries for their attorneys’ fees.
“Our teams have conscientiously worked, for years, to respond to Epic and the state AGs’ discovery requests and we have produced over three million documents, including thousands of chats,” a Google spokesperson said. “We’ll continue to show the court how choice, security, and openness are built into Android and Google Play,” the spokesperson said.
The case is In Re Google Play Store Antitrust Litigation, 21-md-02981, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).
–With assistance from Leah Nylen.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.