The Tuesday (January 31) hearing related to Google's auto-deletion of chats (as part of the Google Play Store Antitrust Litigation in the Northern District of California) is hardly going to be pretty for Google. I've commented on that sanctions process a few times, most recently on Wednesday (in that post you also find links to my previous articles on that issue), and sometimes it feels like I'm the only one to follow the process in granular detail. But once the court slaps Google with sanctions--which is quite a possibility now--the topic may draw considerably more attention.
Shortly before midnight local time on Friday, the two sides filed their responsive post-evidentiary-hearing briefs. You can find them at the end of this post.
The plaintiffs are going for the jugular by asking for punitive sanctions. But that doesn't mean they're wrong: it's a problem of Google's own making. I must say that some of the evidence referenced in and attached to their latest filing strongly suggests both that Google had a culpable state of mind and that the plaintiffs were indeed prejudiced. Should the plaintiffs' position be overreaching, than only to a gradual extent as far as I can see based on the evidence that has been put out in the open.
Google's argument comes down to saying that there are millions of documents--enough to build a case on--and that even if anything relevant was said in those Google-internal chats, it wouldn't add anything new. Well, with a view to both the "culpable state of mind" and extent-of-prejudice questions, there's some pretty damning evidence of Google systematically discussing sensitive issues in non-saved chats. This is evidence that Judge James Donato may not take lightly. It shows that Google just gives lip service to the preservation of evidence by pointing to its encouragement of using chat history or of saving key messages on email: as the plaintiffs note, it's just not realistic that busy managers will be able to make a determination on whether a chat is or is not relevant to a huge and complex case. The only solution is to save everything and have discovery attorneys take a look. But that's what Google wanted to prevent from happening:
In a 2018 document, Google discussed "smart replies", meaning that a chat system proposes likely answers; for instance, if someone proposes a meeting, the system may offer such choices as "works for me". In that context, the assumption is stated that if the preservation of a chat's history is turned off, the content may be sensitive (click on the image to enlarge):
"The assumption is that users often turn History off to discuss sensitive topics." And it's anybody's reasonable assumption that a Googler wouldn't have written this is if it wasn't Google's own policy. Indeed, Google's "Communicate with Care" guidelines for employees say that having off-the-record charts is "[b]etter than sending the email [about the same thing], but not without risk."
The plaintiffs point to a hearing exhibit according to which there were Google-internal instructions that "anything sensitive" should be "move[d] to Chat/video call."
Then there's a document in the evidentiary record where an employee deleted a passage from a Google executive's talking points (concerning some other gaming platform) and wrote:
"Since it’s a sensitive topic, I prefer to discuss offline or over hangout." (Hangout was one of Google's chat systems, though it could also be used for screen sharing, voice calls, and video conferences.)
My favorite smoking gun here is that a Google executive (Larry Yang, who was in charge of Fitbit at some point) made the specific distinction between saved and unsaved chats in connection with legal matters (click on the image to enlarge):
What's similar in nature and even specifically related to Epic's lawsuit is a warning by one Google exec to his colleagues that on-the-record chats "remain in perpetuity" (click on the image to enlarge; I added the arrow that points to the critical passage):
It seems that Googlers don't always communicate with care about their company's Communicate with Care program...
My primary concern is that Google's "Project Hug"--an effort that resulted in various anticompetitive agreements with the likes of Activision Blizzard and Riot Games, ensuring their loyalty to the Google Play Store--is portrayed by Google as just some kind of customer loyalty program involving other services such as the Google Cloud Platform and YouTube, but I have no doubt that the driving motivation was to ensure all major mobile games but Fortnite would remain on the Google Play Store, and some of the automatically deleted chats probably contained smoking guns to that effect. And that's a key issue: Epic and Match amended their complaint (for Epic, it was even the second amendment) to allege a per se violation of Sherman Act Section 1 through those contracts.
Based on what has been put forward--which is only a subset of what the plaintiffs were able to present to Judge Donato--it seems to me that Google is guilty as charged.
Finally, the briefs with all of the (public) attachments: