Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai Grilled on Record-Keeping at Google Play Trial
Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai immediately faced aggressive questioning when he took the witness stand at an antitrust trial over the Google Play app store. A lawyer for Epic Games Inc. grilled Pichai in San Francisco federal court Tuesday over accusations that he has encouraged internal communications to be hidden from enforcers scrutinizing the company for antitrust violations.
Pichai faced a similar attack over his company's records preservation practices when he testified in late October in a landmark Justice Department suit over allegations the company acted like a monopolist with its search business.
Responding Tuesday to questions from Epic's attorney Lauren Moskowitz, Pichai said he marked some emails with the attorney-client privilege tag as he was instructed to do when he was seeking legal advice and also so they “would not be forwarded.” He admitted that he never turned on the setting that would have saved his Google chats when the company was ordered by court to preserve certain records.
The controversy concerns Google's “Communicate with Care” program, under which staff were instructed to copy company lawyers when they didn't technically need to and encouraged to have sensitive conversations over chat with the history function turned off, meaning the conversation is automatically deleted after 24 hours.
The 51-year-old CEO has a long history at Google, where he has held several roles, including helping to engineer the Android strategy and helming development of the Chrome browser.
Google agreed to pay $8 billion over four years to Samsung Electronics Co. to make its search engine, voice assistant and Play Store the default on the company's mobile devices, according to testimony presented by
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