10 things to know from Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s testimony in Google Play trial against Fortnite maker

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai took a stand in front of the court for the second time in 2 weeks earlier today in the antitrust lawsuit by Fortnite publisher Epic Games, who have claimed that the unlawful and monopolistic policies implemented in Google Play store make it difficult for third-party app makers given that the marketplace controls the entire Android ecosystem. During the testimony, Pichai spent almost 90 minutes answering questions about the business practices of the Google Play store, as well as general policies in Google. Let us take a look at the 10 biggest things to come from the testimony.

1. Pichai admitted to using fake legal privilege by marking documents ‘attorney-client privilege' even when he was not seeking any legal advice. He said that he did it to protect the documents from being forwarded via emails to people who weren't in the conversation. Attorney-client privilege dictates that a person can choose not to share certain information with people as they were being protected legally due to being involved in some legal case. Pichai did it when there was no such need, just to avoid giving away the information.

2. Pichai was grilled over the time when he asked for the history to be turned off during an email conversation, which means that the conversation would be deleted in 24 hours. The connection that was made was that Google had a practice of “off the record” chats, and the Epic lawyer believed that it also extended in cases where matters were relevant to an ongoing legal proceeding, for example when Epic Games sued Google in 2020 for Google Play policies.

The lawyer questioned Pichai whether employees followed the rules of not deleting chats where legal holds were involved. He said, “I would expect