The U.S. Justice Department is asking a court to sanction Google for allegedly auto-deleting employee chats that were required for an antitrust lawsuit.
Google has denied the DOJ's allegations, which stem from the department lawsuit filed in 2020 over Google's monopoly in search and search advertising.
- The DOJ claims Google continued to auto-delete internal messaging chat histories after 24 hours, despite being required to preserve them for litigation.
- In these chats, Google employees routinely discussed “substantive and sensitive business," according to the department.
- In a filing Thursday, the DOJ asked a federal judge to sanction Google due to "intentional and repeated destruction of written communications."
- It claims Google continued to use these “off the record chats" even after the suit was filed and the company itself had pledged to suspend the auto-delete feature.
- A Google spokesperson said the company has submitted more than 4 million documents in this particular case alone and its teams "have conscientiously worked for years to respond to inquiries and litigation."
