Epic Games produces documents in antitrust case showing Googlers avoiding its litigation hold

techcrunch.com:

In a new filing in Epic Games’ antitrust case against Google, lawyers for the plaintiffs have submitted a number of exhibits that attempt to demonstrate Google employees’ tendency to switch off chat history on internal discussions. Epic believes this behavior is meant to destroy sensitive communications related to its lawsuit, but it’s not the only one making this claim. The issue with Google’s deletion of chat history was also recently cited by the U.S. Department of Justice in its own antitrust investigation, where it alleged Google had for years “routinely destroyed” an entire category of communication.

That makes the new discovery of communications where Google employees often instructed others to turn off chat all the more interesting.

In one particularly notable instance, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had asked for the chat history to be turned off and then tried to unsuccessfully delete the preceding message. It’s not clear, however, from the exhibit shared with the court that the topic of the conversation would have had bearing on Epic’s antitrust case against the tech giant.

However, in other chats, Google employees were found to be asking others to switch off chat history when discussing more potentially relevant matters, like Revenue Share Agreement (RSA) contracts, Mobile App Distribution Agreements, and a topic called “Project Runway” which was the internal codename for a project that involved changing the Google Play commission rate in response to developer complaints and the threat of regulation.

In another example, Google’s Head of Platforms & Ecosystems Strategy for Android, Margaret Lam, remarks “I talk about RSA related things all day and I don’t have have history on for all my chats :),” after another employee