Antitrust Plaintiffs Seek Sanctions on Google for Destroying Evidence

Google has “irretrievably” destroyed “an unknown but undoubtedly significant number of communications by its employees about relevant business conversations, including on topics at the core of this litigation,” said a motion for sanctions Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco (docket 3:21-cv-05227) in the multistate lawsuit alleging the Google Play Store is anticompetitive. Google permanently deletes Google Chats content every 24 hours -- “and did so even after this litigation commenced,” after plaintiffs “repeatedly inquired about why those chats were missing” from Google’s discovery materials, said the motion. “Google’s failure to comply with its preservation obligations has prejudiced” the plaintiffs and is “sanctionable” under federal rules, it said. The motion asks the court to instruct the jury “that it may or must presume” that the destroyed information “was unfavorable to Google. “Any suggestion that we haven’t preserved and produced responsive documents in this lawsuit is simply wrong," emailed a Google spokesperson Monday. "We’re looking forward to making our case in court and we’re confident that we'll prevail in this unnecessary discovery dispute." Three dozen states and the District of Columbia sued Google in July 2021, alleging the company has taken steps to close the Android ecosystem from competition and “insert itself as the middleman between app developers and consumers.”