In an effort to make it easier to fight antitrust and other lawsuits, Google systematically asked employees to destroy internal communications, avoid certain words and quote lawyers as often as possible. In this way, the company reduces the amount of information that can be used against it in court, the New York Times said.
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The company has resorted to this practice since 2008, when, after the deal with Yahoo, an antitrust investigation was opened – faced with claims on patents, trademarks and copyrights, the company’s management sent a confidential note to subordinates. “We believe that information is good,” the document said, but authorities or competitors may seize on the words that Google employees thoughtlessly wrote to each other. Therefore, company employees should refrain from speculation, sarcasm and “thinking twice” before writing on hot topics, and not enter into correspondence without having all the facts. The default internal messenger settings have been changed to delete chat history 24 hours after messages are sent.
Google developed and maintained this culture, as evidenced by hundreds of documents and exhibits presented in three trials: one with Epic Games and two with the Department of Justice. The company encouraged employees to add lawyers to the list of recipients in correspondence, even if legal issues were not discussed and the lawyer did not respond. Organizations facing litigation are required to preserve documents—Google has faithfully told employees involved in litigation to include messaging history in Messenger, but few have done so. The company sought to ensure that correspondence became as elusive as oral conversations between employees – even if there were witnesses, it could always be said in court that someone had misheard or misunderstood something.
It is not only Google that practices the destruction of internal correspondence: the leaders of the American supermarket chain Albertsons have been seen doing this – the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is trying to prevent its merger with Kroger. Amazon executives, which the same agency has filed antitrust proceedings against, also discussed competition issues through the Signal messaging service, which automatically deletes correspondence. When the commission accused its opponents in court of hiding evidence, this did not entail any consequences for them.
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Judge James Donato, who heard the case of Google against Epic Games, however, saw in the actions of the search giant a “frontal attack on the fair administration of justice” and promised to find those responsible, but this, apparently, has not happened yet. Judge Leonie Brinkema, who is considering the antitrust case on advertising technologies, also expressed dissatisfaction with Google’s behavior – the Ministry of Justice, which is the plaintiff, requested that the missing internal correspondence materials represent a presumption of their unfavorable nature for the company. Google responded by saying it “takes seriously its obligation to preserve and make available relevant documents. We have been responding to inquiries and litigation for years, and we train employees in legal literacy.”
Google was founded in 1998, at the same time that Microsoft had a difficult antitrust trial, during which a lot of incriminating materials were extracted from internal correspondence. In their first ten years, Google employees wrote 13 times more emails per employee than the average company.
In 2011, the company’s management ordered and recommended that subordinates avoid “metaphors associated with wars and sports, victories or defeats,” and not refer to concepts such as “markets,” “market share,” and “dominance.” They were subsequently advised to avoid even the seemingly innocuous phrase “putting products into the hands of new customers” because it “could be interpreted as expressing an intent to deprive consumers of choice.” When the practice came up in court against Epic Games, Google’s lead lawyer, Kent Walker, rejected claims that the company had a “culture of cover-up” where employees were simply not sure what certain words meant.
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In September 2023, Google was put on trial in an antitrust case about dominance in the web search market, and the plaintiff, the Ministry of Justice, said that the company withheld tens of thousands of documents, claiming that they constituted attorney-client privilege – when the court examined them, it denied these materials this status. Judge Amit Mehta, who heard the case, noted that Google had clearly learned Microsoft’s lesson by training employees not to create “bad” evidence. But this did not affect the outcome of the case: in August of this year, he found the company guilty of creating a monopoly.
Google employees, however, have already become a little paranoid about the company and for the sake of their careers. They themselves insist that the history of their correspondence not be saved – sometimes for this they resort to outdated technologies. So, in 2017, the then director of business development at YouTube, Robert Kyncl, asked his boss, the late Susan Wojcicki, if she had a fax machine at home – he did not want his letter to later turn into a legal one. force document. And she didn’t have a fax at home.
Unofficial chats are launched, which employees call “Vegas” – a reference to the phrase “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” The Google employees involved in the lawsuits currently do not have the technical ability to disable the saving of their correspondence history, and by default it is saved for everyone else; It is curious that the word “Vegas” is not mentioned at all in the official corporate messenger, regulators found. But killing the habit is not so easy – Google employees have now created a group for secret communication on WhatsApp.