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According to Bloomberg Law, the director, named Ulku Rowe, accused Google of placing her in a position one level lower and at a lower salary than her less experienced male coworkers hired at the same time when they hired her in 2017. She also claimed that she had missed out on a promotion because of a male coworker who was less senior than she was.

On Friday, a New York jury ruled that Google did indeed discriminate on the basis of gender, and ordered Google to pay Roy $1.15 million (currently about RMB 8.418 million) in punitive damages and moral damages. Roy had 23 years of experience when she joined Google, and the lawsuit documents claimed that Google intentionally underpaid her when it hired her, putting her well below the pay scale of her male colleagues.

Nearly five years ago, about 20,000 Google employees organized a strike to demand changes in the company’s handling of sexual harassment practices and discrimination. Despite the company’s promises to do better on sexual harassment, its response to discrimination still leaves a lot to be desired. According to Bloomberg Law, Roy’s lawsuit is the first such case Google has faced since that protest.

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Evidence provided by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that in July 2003, Hal Varian, then Google’s chief economist, sent a warning e-mail to management, warning that Microsoft’s plan to integrate its own web search service into the Windows operating system would pose a serious threat to Google Search.

At a time when Google was planning a variety of Internet products, Varian cautioned that it should also consider ways to retain users.

So far, Varian said, when Google plans a new product, it considers more technical advantages, user value, potential revenue and other indicators. He argued that while providing a great product is a top priority, Google should also consider rivals’ barriers to entry, switching costs for users, intellectual property rights and other issues.

In Tuesday’s trial, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), as the plaintiff, had Varian testify in court. The Justice Department said that in order to maintain its monopoly in the web search market, Google has provided more than $10 billion a year to rivals, smartphone makers, and mobile communication service providers to set Google as the default search in smartphones or web browsers.

At the start of the trial, U.S. Department of Justice attorney Kenneth Dintzer said the lawsuit is about the future of the search engine market and whether Google search will encounter substantial competitors in the future. The available evidence suggests that Google set up default searches with the goal of suppressing competitors, and so far Google has monopolized 89% of the web search market.

Signs of monopolizing the market

Varian revealed in court on Tuesday that Google’s internal team has been tracking the market share of its own searches for many years, using four internal metrics as well as data provided by third-party market research firms such as Comscore.

Allegedly, as a sign that it had cornered the search market, in 2014 Google’s management decided to stop publishing tracking reports on search market share because the data no longer meant much to Google.

The lawsuit, whose presiding judge is Amit Mehta, is the first time in over 20 years that the U.S. Department of Justice has sued a U.S. technology company.

The trial of the lawsuit will last ten weeks, and if Judge Mehta rules that Google maintains a monopoly in the search market by illegal means, the US Department of Justice will ask the court to order further remedies to break up Google’s monopoly, including divesting Google’s web search engine from other businesses in the same family, such as the Android operating system and Google’s mapping business. If that goal is achieved, it would be the largest divestiture penalty suffered by a U.S. company since U.S. telecom giant AT&T was spun off in 1984.

In response to the Justice Department’s allegations, Google has countered that the company has captured such a high share of the search market because of product excellence, not a lack of competitors to challenge it.

On Tuesday, John Schmidtlein, a member of Google’s legal team, said that consumers use Google search because the product provides value, not because they have to. The attorney emphasized that today’s consumers actually have numerous options for search services and access to information on the Internet compared to the past.

The court’s evidence showed that in 2007, Google executives were considering making the search service more prominent on the homepage to stimulate use and increase market share. The evidence referred to an executive meeting on this element, which included Varian and Pichai (then head of product development at Google and today CEO of Google).

On the witness stand, Varian acknowledged that the Google search service benefited greatly from being the default search in web browsers. He said that overall, being the default search engine was valuable, for Yahoo search, for Microsoft search, and for Google search.

On Wednesday, US time, another key witness

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The lawsuits are being tried separately in 35 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam, and the latest news is that the cases have been consolidated into one case for trial. Over the next ten weeks, the Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general will argue in Washington.

This case focuses on examining Google’s “exclusive deals” with mobile phone manufacturers such as Samsung and Apple, as well as Google’s practice of pre-installing services on Android devices.

The U.S. Department of Justice took Google to court on Tuesday in a landmark trial that marks the first time the Justice Department has brought an antitrust lawsuit against a major tech company in more than 20 years.

The Justice Department alleges that Google illegally established its dominance in online search by entering into exclusive contracts with device manufacturers, mobile carriers and other entities, thereby harming rivals such as Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Google argued that its dominance was not the result of any illegal activity but the superior quality of its search engine and consumer preferences. Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, emphasized:

People use Google not because they have to, but because they want to. It’s easy to switch your default search engine — we’re long past the days of dial-up and CD-ROMs.

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In the ruling, U.S. District Judge James Donato in Los Angeles, California, said Google failed in its duty to preserve evidence related to the case.

The complex antitrust lawsuit reportedly involves multiple jurisdictions, including a consumer class action involving 21 million Americans, covering 38 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, involving companies including gaming Manufacturer Epic and dating service provider Match Group.

The key point of this antitrust lawsuit is that consumers and manufacturer plaintiffs allege that Google’s Play App Store has monopolized practices in distributing Android applications. ). Google, however, denies the monopoly allegations.

As a fine for Google’s destruction of evidence, the court has asked all plaintiffs’ lawyers to provide relevant attorney fee figures by April 21.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit will have an opportunity for Judge Donato to inform all jurors that Google willfully destroyed evidence against the company.

Donato said he will have another look at Google’s performance at a later stage in the lawsuit. He mentioned that Google did everything possible to downplay the issue of destroying evidence and disdained this violation.

In court documents filed last year, Google’s legal team stated that the company has taken various strong measures to preserve chat records related to the case.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys have yet to comment on Judge Donato’s ruling.

In the court documents submitted, the plaintiffs’ legal team stated that they had previously searched for evidence of Google employees’ internal chats related to the core issues of the case, and found that Google would ask employees to delete chat records every 24 hours, even in this case. After the litigation process started, Google continued to delete adverse evidence.

Judge Donato said Google failed to fulfill its obligation to preserve evidence by letting employees make their own decisions about which internal chat evidence is relevant to the lawsuit.

It is reported that the trial in this case will begin in November this year.

As we all know, Google is also facing an antitrust lawsuit from the US Department of Justice, which is being heard by a federal district court in Washington. In the suit, Google is also accused of destroying chat evidence, which the company is vigorously defending.

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In January, the U.S. Department of Justice joined eight states in filing an ad tech lawsuit against Google, accusing it of illegally abusing its dominant position in the online advertising market. The U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google should be forced to sell its ad management suite. Google, for its part, denied any wrongdoing.

“In more than three years of investigating Google’s ad tech business, the U.S. Department of Justice has received more than 2 million documents from Google and obtained more than 30 depositions from Google witnesses,” Alphabet said in a court filing late Monday, “yet the plaintiffs remain unable to find evidentiary support for their claims of antitrust harm.”

Google argued that the case should be dismissed because the government made mistakes in defining the online advertising market and improperly excluded powerful competitors such as Facebook. The company said the government estimated Google’s market share of advertising transactions at “more than 50 percent,” but not at the 70 percent needed for alleged market power. Google also said the government was wrong to assert that Google’s acquisitions of DoubleClick and AdMeld more than 10 years ago harmed competition. At the time, the U.S. antitrust enforcement agency approved both deals.

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