The State Of Texas v. Google, LLC
- P. Castel
- 1:21-cv-06841
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
The State of Texas v. Google: Judge Castel granted limited sealing of employee information but otherwise denied the motion to seal the complaint.
The plaintiff states, Google LLC, the specified Google employees whose identifying information was protected, and members of the public seeking access to the Third Amended Complaint.
What happened
In The State of Texas v. Google, the plaintiff states filed a Third Amended Complaint containing extensive redactions about Google’s advertising business. They acknowledged that some redactions went beyond what they believed was necessary.
Google proposed narrower redactions: the names, job titles, and contact information of certain employees, plus one sentence describing the competitive effects of an ad-buying tool. The plaintiffs opposed redacting that sentence.
Judge Castel granted the motion for the specified employee information but otherwise denied it. The plaintiffs had to publicly file a version of the complaint conforming to the order by January 14, 2022.
The detailed version
- The State Of Texas v. Google, LLC · No. 1:21-cv-06841
- P. Castel
- Jan. 12, 2022
Background
This order concerns a motion to seal portions of the Third Amended Complaint in the related digital-advertising antitrust litigation. In an earlier order, the court had granted in part and denied in part Google’s request to redact information from public view. That earlier ruling allowed redaction of certain Google employees’ names, job titles, and email addresses, along with details about the engineering of Google’s “predictive modeling” process.
The plaintiff states then filed a Third Amended Complaint with extensive redactions. They explained that the redactions were made “out of an abundance of caution” and included more material than they believed needed protection. Google proposed narrower redactions: the names, job titles, and contact information of certain employees identified in specified paragraphs, and one sentence in paragraph 400 describing the competitive effects of a Google ad-buying tool used by large advertisers.
Court’s analysis
The court concluded that the privacy interests in the specified employees’ names, job titles, and contact information outweighed the public’s general right to inspect court records. It therefore allowed those portions to remain sealed.
The court reached a different conclusion about the proposed redaction in paragraph 400. It found that the sentence did not disclose technical or proprietary information and that Google had not shown a privacy interest strong enough to overcome the presumption of public access. The court therefore rejected that redaction.
Ruling
Judge Castel granted the motion to seal the Third Amended Complaint as to the employee names, job titles, and contact information identified in paragraphs 114, 115, 157, 251, 352, 364, 371, 385, 397, and 415, but otherwise denied the motion. The Clerk was directed to terminate the motion, and the plaintiffs were directed to publicly file a conforming version of the complaint by January 14, 2022. This order addressed access to court filings and did not decide the underlying antitrust claims.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.