When Google lost its anti-trust trial for the Landmark in August, its top lawyer, Kent Walker, reminded employees for the third time that they were not allowed to discuss the case with each other or with people outside the company.
On Friday afternoon, Google retracted the command as part of a settlement with the Alphabet Workers Union, a group representing some of the employees and contractors, according to an email sent to workers and viewed by the New York Times. Alphabet is the parent company of Google.
The company told employees it “will not announce or maintain any overload rules or policies that restrict the right to comment internally or externally” about how Google's search engine-targeted antitrust laws affect the terms of employment.
The Google song change was part of a settlement overseen by the National Labor Relations Commission. The union had filed a complaint of unfair labor practices with the NLRB in August regarding Walker's memo.
The agreement is another blow to Google's corporate policy, designed to maintain the secrets scrutinized in search cases filed by the Department of Justice. It also reduces Google's strategy to maintain business humming during litigation. Keep employees ignoring the antitrust fight and focusing on their work.
Walker, Google's president of Global Affairs, first told employees not to discuss the case when it was filed in October 2020, according to an email viewed by The Times.
“It's important not to be bothered with this process, including not inferring legal issues internally or externally,” he writes, instructing employees to instead focus on building great products and services to help people.
He repeated the calls in September 2023 when the case went to trial, and when Google called again in August when it lost the trial. The NLRB settlement concerns its final memo only.
Two months later, Google's vice president of regulation, Lee-Anne Mulholland, tried to make it clear that Walker's instructions had spoken to the public on Google's behalf.
“It was the basis of Kent's previous demand that Google refrain from commenting,” she said.
Google spokesman Courtenay Mencini said the company opposed the interpretation of the NLRB “a reasonable request that employees do not comment on pending lawsuits on behalf of Google without approval.”
“To avoid long lawsuits, we agreed to remind employees that they have the right to talk about their employment because they have always been free and regularly,” she added.
The Justice Department is seeking Google's disbandment, including the sale of its popular web browser, Chrome, among other relief measures aimed at regaining search competition. Federal judge Amit P. Mehta will decide what relief measures should be imposed by August.
Stephen McMurtry, a senior software engineer at Google Search and union member, said in an interview that it was difficult to coordinate all legal conspiracies.
“There is a fear among employees in general that breakups can provide for our employment, working conditions, compensation, and the instability that can be provided to all sorts of things,” McMurtry said.
Like other large tech companies, Google has established a secret pattern of its culture and corporate communication. After Microsoft's legal defense was hamstrung for damaging emails in an antitrust exam quarter-century-old exam, Google tried to learn from the company's example by telling employees not to make the company's actions sound anti-competitive.
Google also routinely discussed sensitive business issues with automatically deleted instant messaging, but the company says it has handed over many chats to the Department of Justice.
