Right now, Google is in the grips of yet another antitrust lawsuit that can have a massive impact on its business structure. The DOJ (Department Of Justice) is suing the company on the grounds that Google is running a monopoly on the ad market. Well, during the case, it appears that Google may have tried to hide its message history to hide some of its unsavory business practices.
Lawsuit recap
Right now, Google is fighting its third major antitrust lawsuit within a year’s time, and it lost the previous two. The first was the lawsuit that ruled Google was running a monopoly on the Android app market. The second was much more significant, and it saw Google charged as the owner of a search monopoly.
This third case takes aim at its ad business. Much of Google’s income comes from selling ads. However, it’s such a major force in the online ad market that it’s pretty much in charge of the ad buying and ad selling process. This way, it’s able to basically make the rules on how ads are sold on the internet.
Other companies like Meta and Microsoft also sell ads, and they also have a sizeable piece of the ad market in their claws. However, Google has a much larger influence, owning up to 90% of the ad market in some regions. This is somewhat because of the numerous buyouts of online advertising companies like DoubleClick.
On the fourth day of the trial, we found out that Google negatively affected publishers by getting rid of their freedom to choose the price floor when auctioning ad space. This is something that looks bad on Google’s part.
Google may have tried to hide its message history
Cases like these always tend to dig up some old skeletons that companies have buried. Google was instructed by the court to reserve its conversations for investigation purposes. However, the court saw several documents marked “privileged and confidential”. If that’s not bad enough, some Google employees were told to use Google Chat in a way that won’t leave a paper trail.
As you can tell, this looks pretty suspicious for the company. Google executives and other higher-level workers typically talk about pretty much everything, both the good and the bad. If they’re instructed not to leave a paper trail, then you can bet that they’re hiding something pretty bad.
However, the court isn’t accusing the company of hiding incriminating evidence. It just seems that way.
Hiding messages
A few Google employees testified on Friday regarding the Google Chat practices. Many Google employees communicated through this application, and they were sometimes instructed to start conversations with the chat history turned off. That’s pretty shady. This means that no one could pull up a record of the conversation.
Chris LaSala, a former Google sell-side ad executive expanded on this. When the company was placed on a litigation hold, Google Chat conversations had their chat history turned off by default. That was only if there weren’t any significant work messages. In that case, the history would need to be turned back on. However, several Google employees admitted to having some significant conversations with the history turned off.
Speaking of old skeletons, a 2020 conversation reached the surface, revealing an interaction between LaSala and other colleagues. In the message, the colleague asked LaSala if they should talk about a topic over email or if it was “too sensitive for email,” and they asked if they should, “keep on ping?” LaSala’s response was “start a ping with history turned off.” That’s not a good look. This was Chris basically telling the employee to enter a back alley conversation.
That’s not all, as another conversation involving LaSala telling an employee to “maybe start an off the record ping thread with Duke, you, me.”
As a response to the court, LaSala mentioned that he tried to follow the terms of the hold, but he “made a mistake.” He said that, though the history was turned on, he wanted to make sure that the first message was preserved, so he put the message in the email to be safe. “We were really good at documenting … and to the extent I made a mistake a couple times, it was not intentional.”
Confidential documents
Along with the Google Chat conversations, there were several documents presented to the court that were marked “Privileged and Confidential”. For example, one email from former Google executive Rahul Srinivasan mentioned Google’s Communicate with Care policy. It’s a policy that ensures that the workers are careful when they refer to certain things. For example, when referring to something as “Circumventive.”
An interesting part of an email reads, “We should assume that every document (and email) we generate will likely be seen by regulators.” Obviously, that’s a pretty damning piece of literature right there. Again, nothing incriminating was said in the emails (as far as we know), but the fact that Google was so secretive about certain conversations makes the court feel that the company has something to hide.
A Google spokesperson responded to the court about this subject, “We take seriously our obligations to preserve and produce relevant documents.” He continued to say “We have for years responded to inquiries and litigation, and we educate our employees about legal privilege. In the DOJ cases alone, we have produced millions of documents including chat messages and documents not covered by legal privilege.”
Whether Google was trying to cover up shady practices or not, this doesn’t look good for the company. Google is already on thin ice, having a ton of evidence and testimony come out against it. The last thing Google needs is to be trying to cover up its message history.
