The battle between Google and the United States government continues as the Department of Justice (DOJ) took further legal action against Google, accusing the tech giant of being uncooperative and slow to fulfill requests.
In a joint filing from Thursday, March 19, 2021, the DOJ accused Alphabet’s Google of deliberately dragging its feet in providing documents needed for the antitrust lawsuit filed against the company.
The lawsuit that Google is facing alleges that the company engaged in anticompetitive conduct to preserve its monopolies in the search and search-advertising markets that form the cornerstones of its empire.
In the original lawsuit, the DOJ is asked the courts “to restrain Google LLC (Google) from unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices, and to remedy the effects of this conduct.”
The DOJ is now applying pressure on Google to provide them with a large number of documents that pertain to the ongoing litigation. The DOJ claimed that the company had balked at some search terms that the government wanted Google to use to locate relevant documents. The DOJ estimated the request to Google would produce 4.85 million documents.
“To avoid a larger production of documents, Google (1) has not attempted to identify search terms that address many of Plaintiffs’ document requests, (2) has declared that it will not accept any of the currently disputed custodians Plaintiffs’ propose, and (3) has unilaterally limited the date ranges for which it is willing to pull responsive information. Google has failed to provide significant justification for these actions, and its general claims of burden are quickly dispelled given the reasonable documents counts yielded by Plaintiffs’ Current Search Proposal,” read the filing.
Google devised a plan to produce fewer documents than requested by the DOJ, in which Google sets the information-categories. The DOJ did not agree to Google’s proposed search terms and claimed that “Google cannot simply rewrite Plaintiffs’ discovery requests as it sees fit.”
The pace at which Google is producing documents has also proved to be a sticking point for the DOJ.
“In short, Google’s plan is to produce only approximately 800,000 documents over four months. This is a glacial pace of production for a party with Google’s resources, especially when considered in light of similarly situated litigants in past cases,” read the DOJ’s portion of the filing pertaining to the current rate of document production.
For Google’s part, the company views the DOJ’s request as unreasonable and far too sweeping.
“The DOJ Plaintiffs’ proposal is unreasonable and not proportional to the needs of this case, nor is it calculated to retrieve relevant, non-cumulative information within the schedule that the Plaintiffs agreed to in this case,” responded Google in the filing.
The filing also concerned requests for documents from some of Google’s “custodians.” The custodians are individuals whose emails and other documents would be searched as part of pre-trial document production.
The DOJ’s second request for information from Google requested documents from 77 new custodians, a significant increase from the 92 identified in the first request.
“In short, the search terms provided in the DOJ Plaintiffs’ latest proposal contemplate that Google will review well over 20 million documents in connection with this investigation and litigation for the first 76 custodians alone,” read part of the filing.
