Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to the news on the morning of March 30, Beijing time, a court in California has ruled that Google, owned by the tech giant Alphabet, will be fined and face further punishment in the follow-up trial after deliberately destroying employees' internal chat evidence during an Android operating system antitrust lawsuit.

James Donato, a federal district court judge in Los Angeles, California, said in the ruling that Google had not fulfilled its responsibility in preserving the evidence in the case.

The complex antitrust lawsuit is reported to involve several jurisdictions, including a consumer class action against 21 million Americans, covering 38 states and the District of Columbia, including game maker Epic and dating service Match Group.

The key point of the antitrust lawsuit is that consumers and manufacturers accuse Google's Play App Store of monopolizing the release of Android apps, all of which are seeking damages of up to $4.7 billion (currently about 32.383 billion yuan). But Google denies the monopoly charge.

As a fine for Google's destruction of evidence, the court has asked all plaintiffs' lawyers to provide figures on their legal fees by April 21.

The plaintiff in the lawsuit will be given an opportunity for Judge Donato to inform all jury members that Google deliberately damaged evidence against the company.

Donato said he would learn about Google's performance again at a later stage of the lawsuit. He mentioned that Google did everything possible to play down the issue of destroying evidence and disdained the violation.

In court documents filed last year, Google's legal team said the company had taken various strong measures to keep chat records related to the case.

The plaintiff's legal team has not commented on Judge Donato's decision.

In the court documents filed, the plaintiffs' lawyers said they had previously looked for evidence of internal chat among Google employees related to the core issues of the case and found that Google would ask employees to delete chat records every 24 hours. Even after the litigation process began, Google continued to delete adverse evidence.

Judge Donato said Google let employees make their own decisions on which internal chat evidence was relevant to the lawsuit and failed to meet its obligation to retain the evidence.

It is reported that the trial of the case will begin in November this year.

As we all know, Google also faces an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice, which is heard by a federal district court in Washington. In the lawsuit, Google is also accused of destroying chat evidence, which the company is fiercely defending.

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