Why No Arrests?

We have more and more evidence showing that senior management at The Chocolate Family have been systematically destroying and hiding incriminating evidence for over a decade.

This is clearly illegal and clearly criminal: 

In late 2008, as Google faced antitrust scrutiny over an advertising deal with its rival Yahoo and confronted lawsuits involving patent, trademark and copyright claims, its executives sent out a confidential memo.

“We believe that information is good,” the executives told employees in the memo. But, they added, government regulators or competitors might seize on words that Google workers casually, thoughtlessly wrote to one another.

To minimize the odds that a lawsuit could flush out comments that might be incriminating, Google said, employees should refrain from speculation and sarcasm and “think twice” before writing one another about “hot topics.” “Don’t comment before you have all the facts,” they were instructed.

The technology was tweaked, too. The setting for the company’s instant messaging tool was changed to “off the record.” An incautious phrase would be wiped the next day.

………

The exhibits and testimony showed that Google took numerous steps to keep a lid on internal communications. It encouraged employees to put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded. 

Companies anticipating litigation are required to preserve documents. But Google exempted instant messaging from automatic legal holds. If workers were involved in a lawsuit, it was up to them to turn their chat history on. From the evidence in the trials, few did.

Of course no one did.

………

Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who presided over the Epic case, said that there was “an ingrained systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence within Google” and that the company’s behavior was “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” He added that after the trial, he was “going to get to the bottom” of who was responsible at Google for allowing this behavior. Judge Donato declined to comment.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, who is overseeing Google’s antitrust case involving advertising technology, said at a hearing in August that the company’s document retention policies were “not the way in which a responsible corporate entity should function.” She added, “An awful lot of evidence has likely been destroyed.”

The Justice Department has asked Judge Brinkema for sanctions, which would be a presumption that the missing material was unfavorable to Google on the issues it is on trial for, including monopoly power and whether its conduct was anticompetitive. Closing arguments in the case are scheduled for Monday.

That's not enough.  You need to arrest senior management, and as well as any lower level executives who participated in this.