Here's how Google spent 15 years in creating a culture of concealment

Firm told employees to destroy messages, avoid certain words and copy lawyers as often as possible to avoid antitrust suits

By David Streitfeld 

In late 2008, as Google faced antitrust scrutiny over an advertising deal with its rival Yahoo and confronted lawsuits involving patent, trademark and copyright claims, its executives sent out a confidential memo.

 

“We believe that information is good,” the executives told employees in the memo. But, they added, government regulators or competitors might seize on words that Google workers casually, thoughtlessly wrote to one another.

 

To minimise the odds that a lawsuit could flush out comments that might be incriminating, Google said, employees should refrain from speculation and sarcasm and “think twice” before writing one another about “hot topics.” “Don’t comment before you have all the facts,” they were instructed.

 

The technology was tweaked, too. The setting for the company’s instant messaging tool was changed to “off the record.” An incautious phrase would be wiped the next day.

 

The memo became the first salvo in a 15-year campaign by Google to make deletion the default in its internal communications. Even as the internet giant stored the world’s information, it created an office culture that tried to minimise its own. Among its tools: using legal privilege as an all-purpose shield and imposing restraints on its own technology, all while continually warning that loose lips could sink even the most successful corporation.

 

How Google developed this distrustful culture was pieced together from hundreds of documents and exhibits, as well as witness testimony, in three antitrust trials against the Silicon Valley company over the last year. The plaintiffs — Epic Games in one case, the Department of Justice in the other two — were trying to establish monopoly behavior, which required them to look through emails, memos and instant messages from hundreds of Google engineers and executives.

 

The exhibits and testimony showed that Google took numerous steps to keep a lid on internal communications. It encouraged employees to put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded. Companies anticipating litigation are required to preserve documents. But Google exempted instant messaging from automatic legal holds. If workers were involved in a lawsuit, it was up to them to turn their chat history on. From the evidence in the trials, few did. Google is far from the only company trying to keep newer forms of communication out of the courtroom. As instant messages and text messages have become popular office tools, corporations and regulators have increasingly clashed over how the missives can be used in court.

 

In August, the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing to stop a $25 billion supermarket merger between Albertsons and Kroger, said several Albertsons executives had demonstrated “a pervasive practice” of deleting business-related text messages in defiance of legal requirements to keep them. Some of these texts, the FTC argued, suggested that at least one executive thought prices might increase as a result of the merger. The judge said Albertsons “failed to take reasonable steps” to preserve the messages, but did not punish the chain. Albertsons declined to comment.

 

In April, the FTC said in a legal filing as part of its antitrust case against Amazon that company executives had used the disappearing message tool Signal to discuss competition issues, even after they were required to keep all communications in the case.

 

Amazon said the assertions that it had destroyed information were “baseless and irresponsible.” But Google has faced the broadest

criticism for its actions, with the judges in all three antitrust cases chastising the company for its communications practices.

 

In a statement, Google said it took “seriously our obligations to preserve and produce relevant documents. We have for years responded to inquiries and litigation, and we educate our employees about legal privilege.”

   

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