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Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

wsj.com

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Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#71

Post by uoaei »

vorpalhex wrote: post #33
uoaei wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economics isn't culture. "Culture war" isn't just "disagreements", it's disagreements about things that only exist in the realm of culture, e.g. saggy pants or watching people of the same gender kiss on TV. Economics, in fact, plays a central role here, given the profit motive that, to the bad actors, justifies these actions despite their illegality.

> A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices.[1] It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war It sounds like you are confusing culture with aesthetics.

Where in that definition do you propose governance comes in? Do you think culture is governable? To me, culture lies outside the scope of governance entirely -- it's literally just what people do to express themselves and the ways they like to spend their time.

> Societal values

Notice it doesn't say economic or material values.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#72

Post by donalhunt »

saagarjha wrote: post #11

I think we’re going to see another cycle in tech, much like the one where they realized that people kept saying illegal things in a documented fashion and this kept getting them into trouble leading to short retention policies. Except this time it will probably involve mandatory court-ordered retention which will further push people towards dropping “let’s discuss this offline” comments and trying to hide their conve…

It's a bit weird that this is even a thing given Google's ecosystem supports retention and litigation holds - technology acquired through buying Postini iirc.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#73

Post by autoexec »

mitchellst wrote: post #43

I'll add a recent misfortune for a peer company: https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/judge-sanctions-faceb... Looks like the real powers in the US are losing patience with some of the low-level legal tomfoolery of big tech. About time. Nothing against the companies, but make your money by making products people love, not by playing footsie with the court system.

Google thinks they are above the law and bigger and more powerful than the US government. It will be interesting to see if the courts throw the book at Google for directly disobeying them and assert themselves as having control or if they'll roll over and confirm Google as our unelected King.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#74

Post by cldellow »

jonas21 wrote: post #32

Is the DoJ's argument that if you anticipate being sued in the future, you're not allowed to use private messaging at all?

I think the argument is that if:

> All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had “put a legal hold in place” that “suspends auto-deletion.”

...then you better not be auto-deleting things for the next 3 years.

The lawsuit details that the language Google used when telling the DOJ what they were protecting. Hangouts is included in that language.

Google also revised their retention policies for chats not once, but _twice_ during the litigation, but somehow no-one thought that maybe deleting the chats should be mentioned to the US government.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#75

Post by Jtsummers »

shadowgovt wrote: post #62
omginternets wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious, what is the legal process for dealing with manufactured privilege?

What is manufactured privilege?

Communications with your lawyer are privileged. Communications with other people are not (necessarily) privileged. By looping in the lawyer it creates a pretext (that probably won't hold up) for claiming it is privileged communication.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#76

Post by wpietri »

ROTMetro wrote: post #66
shadowgovt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a horse in this race (anymore), but in the abstract I would love if government aligned incentives so that it was more painful for companies to toss records that should have been retained than to retain records that are damaging to them in hindsight, which they were legally allowed at some point to toss. For precisely the reason you indicated.

Then companies will just get rid of chat tools because informal discussions can be turned to fit any narrative. 'wow, Bob picked the worst possible way to solve xyz' negligence, knowingly having incompetent developers. You yourself said Bob's solutions were the worst possible. 'looking back, we should have implemented XYZ differently but we are stuck with that implementation now' can be about something harmless but b…

Companies can't get rid of chat tools anymore than previous bureaucracies could stop using paper. Operating at current scale requires digital communication. If they tried to cut that off, they'd discover that things stopped working. Twitter gave us an example of that just this week: https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musk...

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#78

Post by donalhunt »

ROTMetro wrote: post #57
ss108 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. "Every day employees" are not the ones who needed to do this.

They can be if the policy was that individual employees needed to self enforce retention on XYZ topics and employees were provided training to that effect. The Feds can not say a company must retain all records going forward, only that it make reasonable effort to retain relevant records and training employees to place items going forward in some sort of vault historically qualifies, especially when this training/ret…

Doesn't work like that. Done centrally.

See https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7664657

The issue seems to be around use of "off the record" chat settings which are not covered by Vault (somewhat surprisingly for this audience; quite desirably for the target audience it would seem).

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#79

Post by HDThoreaun »

megous wrote: post #42

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." ~Eric Schmidt lol

I believe Sundar got in trouble for labelling every single email "confidential attorney client privilege" and cc'ing the legal team so that none of what he says would be released in discovery.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#80

Post by sircastor »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #3

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-s... > The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few cu…

I user to work for an Automotive OEM, and I would get these emails with some frequency (sent to the whole company) that would instruct us to make sure we're not deleting or clearing materials related to some thing. I don't think the whole time I worked there any of it related to anything I was working on. We eventually had a training with counsel about keeping materials and why we didn't even want the appearance of anything suspicious.
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