Don’t Let Google ‘Get Away’ With Its Evidence ‘Spoliation’: Plaintiffs

It's now clear that Google has been “deliberately deleting” pertinent evidentiary chats for years, including throughout the Google Play Store antitrust litigation, said the various plaintiffs, including eight states, in their reply brief Friday (docket 3:21-cv-05227) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco. “At every step, Google has attempted to keep its misconduct from coming to light,” said the plaintiffs. Google’s “willful destruction” of documents deprived the plaintiffs of “critical evidence regarding agreements with potential competitors, changes to Google’s prices, and changes to its tie of Google Play Billing -- all critical issues in this litigation,” they said. “To make matters worse, the remedies Google proposes show that it does not take this issue seriously,” and would be “nothing more than a slap on the wrist,” they said. “Google cannot be allowed to get away with its spoliation.” Google and the plaintiffs “sharply disagree as to whether Google’s long-standing approach to chat preservation” is reasonable, said Google’s reply brief. If the court concludes the plaintiffs are right and Google got it wrong, “then the remedy must be limited to addressing the actual prejudice” shown by the plaintiffs, if any, it said. The plaintiffs “do not, and could not, claim that they were prejudiced by the loss of any chats sent before August 2020,” when Epic Games filed the first complaint in the consolidated actions, said Google. “Nor do they argue that this issue affected the tens of thousands of non-chat documents produced by Google that post-date August 2020 or the millions that pre-date August 2020.”