Google Settles Shareholder Lawsuit, Sill Spend $500 Million On Being Less Evil (arstechnica.com) 22
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It has become a common refrain during Google's antitrust saga: What happened to "don't be evil?" Google's unofficial motto has haunted it as it has grown ever larger, but a shareholder lawsuit sought to rein in some of the company's excesses. And it might be working. The plaintiffs in the case have reached a settlement with Google parent company Alphabet, which will spend a boatload of cash on "comprehensive" reforms. The goal is to steer Google away from the kind of anticompetitive practices that got it in hot water.
Under the terms of the settlement, obtained by Bloomberg Law, Alphabet will spend $500 million over the next 10 years on systematic reforms. The company will have to form a board-level committee devoted to overseeing the company's regulatory compliance and antitrust risk, a rarity for US firms. This group will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. There will also be reforms at other levels of the company that allow employees to identify potential legal pitfalls before they affect the company. Google has also agreed to preserve communications. Google's propensity to use auto-deleting chats drew condemnation from several judges overseeing its antitrust cases. The agreement still needs approval from US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco, but that's mainly a formality at this point. Naturally, Alphabet does not admit to any wrongdoing under the terms of the settlement, but it may have to pay tens of millions in legal fees on top of the promised $500 million investment.
Under the terms of the settlement, obtained by Bloomberg Law, Alphabet will spend $500 million over the next 10 years on systematic reforms. The company will have to form a board-level committee devoted to overseeing the company's regulatory compliance and antitrust risk, a rarity for US firms. This group will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. There will also be reforms at other levels of the company that allow employees to identify potential legal pitfalls before they affect the company. Google has also agreed to preserve communications. Google's propensity to use auto-deleting chats drew condemnation from several judges overseeing its antitrust cases. The agreement still needs approval from US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco, but that's mainly a formality at this point. Naturally, Alphabet does not admit to any wrongdoing under the terms of the settlement, but it may have to pay tens of millions in legal fees on top of the promised $500 million investment.
What killed the discussion? (Score:2)
Vacuous AC contributions like that one?
Anyway, too late to offer any solution considerations as the topic dies at the bottom of the front page.
Should never let them get away with no admission (Score:2)
The shareholders should have gone the distance and got the admission of guilt. The first step is admitting there is a problem. There can be literally no meaningful progress until and unless they do admit there was a problem. Now it's just "what do we need to do to make this go away" and will be lip service only.
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The shareholders should have gone the distance and got the admission of guilt.
The problem is the shareholders want Google to be profitable. They are owners, and generally owners with the hopes that the value of the shares will go up, and they can sell at a profit.
An admission of guilt is a legal artifact that can be discovered in other lawsuits and used as a bludgeon. So having a “yeah, we totally admit we violated a whole bunch of laws” document signed by the CEO and board means Google is going to all but automatically lose lawsuits that turn on those facts. Like
Hmm? Who? (Score:2)
Google Settles Shareholder Lawsuit, Sill Spend $500 Million On Being Less Evil
Who or what is Sill?
Re: (Score:2)
Guessing editor fat-fingered "Will" ...
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A windows product?
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Google Settles Shareholder Lawsuit, Sill Spend $500 Million On Being Less Evil
Who or what is Sill?
A vital part of alcohol production.
Auto-deleting chat criticism is weird (Score:4, Interesting)
The auto-deleting chat criticism is a bit weird to me. Every big corporation I've worked for (four of them -- including Google -- as an employee, and maybe two dozen more as a contractor/consultant) has had automatic email deletion policies, and before that they had policies requiring memos and other written communications to be shredded/burned. Offices had boxes with slots in them that you dumped documents in and the contents were collected and destroyed daily. Automatic deletion of chats seems like a straightforward extension of typical American corporate policy. I'm not saying such policies are "right", just that they're routine. They're routine, of course, because the US is a very litigious country.
The flip side is that American corporations also have document preservation processes in place, so that any employee whose job might touch on a topic of active litigation has their documents and communications exempted from automatic destruction. There might be legitimate criticism of Google if Google didn't have those processes or didn't use them appropriately, but I've never seen any claim of that in any of the news about the court cases.
But maybe there's some nuance to Google's actions that I've missed.
Re: Auto-deleting chat criticism is weird (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked at Google when the internal chat deletion was enabled. It was pretty clear that the goal was purely to lower the ability to get audited during lawsuits.
IANAL but I think it became pretty bad when Google started doing government work which has strong requirements to retain such information. Google would CC lawyers on potentially sensitive communications in order to claim attorney/client privilege, even if the attorney would not read the content, it was just cc-ex to prevent discovery. Then they banned the use of written notes on anything remotely sensitive.
I once had a VP at a different company asking to delete emails after 30 days, which is ridiculously short, especially considering we had 3 weeks release cycles.
Once your communications systems are highly optimized to prevent discovery, and you are convinced multiple times of illegal practices, it is pretty clear that you should be banned from trying to hide the truth.
See how it works with high level politicians, be it with personal emails servers or the use of platforms like Telegram.
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I worked at Google when the internal chat deletion was enabled. It was pretty clear that the goal was purely to lower the ability to get audited during lawsuits.
Sure. That's the reason all American companies have auto-deletion policies. It's not about saving storage space.
IANAL but I think it became pretty bad when Google started doing government work which has strong requirements to retain such information
I haven't seen any allegations that Google failed to comply with contractual retention requirements, and that doesn't seem to be what the judges are complaining about. Have you seen anything like that?
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In theory, all businesses should preserve their internal communications in case of litigation. In reality, the real evil stuff simply wouldn't be written down.
The solution is to write laws that look at externally observable behavior and only allow an affirmative defense in case of an accident (i.e. the business must prove it's an accident, instead of the DA having to prove it's intentional).
Does it matter why there was leak of toxic chemicals? A business caused the leak to exist and so the cost of clean up
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In theory, all businesses should preserve their internal communications in case of litigation.
Whose theory is that? It's not a law, and it's certainly not what the legal department of any corporation will say.
In reality, the real evil stuff simply wouldn't be written down.
Indeed. Not just "evil" stuff, either. Anything that could be interpreted badly when presented out of context with the right spin. For example, basically all HR discussions everywhere (in the US, at least) are conducted by phone or video conference, then followed by carefully crafted written documentation, because HR is a legal minefield. This is true even when everyone is doing their level
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The auto-deleting chat criticism is a bit weird to me. Every big corporation I've worked for (four of them -- including Google -- as an employee, and maybe two dozen more as a contractor/consultant) has had automatic email deletion policies, and before that they had policies requiring memos and other written communications to be shredded/burned. Offices had boxes with slots in them that you dumped documents in and the contents were collected and destroyed daily. Automatic deletion of chats seems like a straightforward extension of typical American corporate policy. I'm not saying such policies are "right", just that they're routine. They're routine, of course, because the US is a very litigious country. [...]
But maybe there's some nuance to Google's actions that I've missed.
Google’s email (when I was there, I was a layoff victim ~2 years back) has something like a year long self delete policy, and anything you apply an archive tag to gets kept “forever”. So it is modestly durable. Plus of corse if Google gets sued and you or a work area you are involved in gets identified as a discoverable asset you get to be on discovery hold and all the mail gets retained until that process is over (and it can last years or decades).
Google’s chats self deleted in
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I was a layoff victim ~2 years back
That sucks. We lost a lot of good people in those layoffs. Google is still trying to reduce headcount through smaller, incremental layoffs but mostly through attrition.
BTW, I work for Google, going on 15 years now. I'm not trying to defend Google; my job is writing code, not PR. But I worked a lot of places before Google, and Google's email retention policy isn't remotely unusual. If anything, at 18 months it's a little longer than most places. I'm not sure how the rest of the corporate world is handli
$50M per year over 10 years (Score:1)
Profit! (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Eventually does evil.
3. Makes Billions doing evil stuff
4. Pays Millions in fines and judicial fees
5. Profit!
Re: Profit! (Score:2)
Moto was "Don't be evil", which still allows to "do evil" just not on purpose. Dropping it was a clear message to the rest of the world that they could do evil on purpose, without internal questioning.
$50 million a year for them is a rounding error (Score:3)
$50 million a year for them is a rounding error... they spend almost as much on printer paper every year...
and they had a budget of $115 million a year for WFH allowance's for staff... this $500 ($50) million is pointless... the lawyers got richer... no change... some symbolic value for those that don't understand how insignificant of a pain this is for the organization.
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Google Doubles Its Money on this Settlement (Score:3)
I don't understand (Score:2)