Google’s antitrust lawsuit takes a dark turn

The Department of Justice (DOJ) says that Google regularly deletes chat logs from internal communications, even though the company must keep them for an antitrust lawsuit.

When it comes to antitrust cases, the Department of Justice and coalitions of states have all thrown the gauntlet at Google. In this case, the Department of Justice is enforcing a lawsuit against the defendants in 2020 for “illegally maintaining monopolies” in the search and search-related advertising industries.

DOJ says Google destroyed chat evidence for its antitrust lawsuit

In a filing made public on Thursday, the Department of Justice said that Google “systematically destroyed” IM chats every 24 hours, which is against federal rules that say communications that could be useful in court should be kept.

Even so, Google reportedly told the government that it had “put a legal hold in place” to stop its chat tool from automatically deleting messages. The DOJ says that the company’s claim was a lie and only stopped deleting chat histories this week after being told that the agency would file a motion for sanctions. It now asks the court to say that Google broke a federal rule and set up a hearing to determine how to punish the company. The DOJ also wants the court to tell Google to tell the court more about how it handles chats.

Google, on the other hand, says that the DOJ is wrong. The Wall Street Journal quoted a spokesperson: “Our teams have conscientiously worked for years to respond to inquiries and litigation. In fact, we have produced over 4 million documents in this case alone, and millions more to regulators around the world.”

The DOJ says that Google should have changed its defaults around the middle of 2019, “when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation.”

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