Alphabet Wants Sanctions Request Dropped in Antitrust Case

Google parent Alphabet has urged a judge at its antitrust case to reject requests from the Justice Department that it be sanctioned over allegations of attorney-client privilege abuse, Reuters reported Thursday (March 24).

The department asked the judge to sanction Google over the company’s “Communicate with Care” program reportedly being a “game” to shield communications that didn’t generally fall under attorney-client privilege.

However, Google said those accusations were not true and a “misreading of a small number of slides used to train employees.”

The tech giant said it was conferring with the government over which emails were possibly breaking the rules, and had given the government some of the documents in question.

“Plaintiffs come nowhere close to proving the bad-faith misconduct that is required to strip a party of its privilege protections,” Google said in its filing, per Reuters.

According to the report, the Justice Department had filed the lawsuit in 2020, accusing Google of violating antitrust rules in the way it used its search business. The trial on this case is set for September 2023.

There have been a slew of antitrust cases and related legal actions taken up against Big Tech companies recently, especially the largest American ones.

PYMNTS wrote that an advertising agreement between Alphabet’s Google and Meta’s Facebook is under investigation in multiple probes from the European Union’s European Commission and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority.

See also: UK, EU Launch Parallel Antitrust Probes Into Google-Meta Ad Deal

Both of them are looking into the agreement between the two tech giants, which was code-named Jedi Blue. The investigation will focus on whether it cut down on market competition for online display ad services.

The secret deal was from 2018 and surfaced during a U.S. lawsuit from 2020 by 10 state attorneys general.

The agreement would essentially give Facebook advantages and guarantees for Google ad space auctions and positions. In return, Facebook would agree to spend a certain amount on display ads.