Texas and other states suing Google over its digital ads practices should be barred from questioning top executives including CEO Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin, attorneys for the Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit told a U.S. judge on Tuesday.
Tuesday’s filing also asked U.S. District Judge Sean Jordan to block Texas from deposing YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, who was questioned previously as part of an investigation by the state and U.S. Justice Department, which sued Google in a related lawsuit last year in Virginia federal court.
Companies often battle in court over demands to force high-ranking executives to sit for hours fielding questions about core business practices.
Plaintiffs can face a high bar to secure such depositions, which are part of the pretrial fact-gathering stage of a court case.
Google declined to comment, and attorneys for Texas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google has denied violating U.S. antitrust law and the company’s bid to dismiss the states’ 2021 lawsuit is pending.
The plaintiffs in their request to depose Pichai and Brin said they have information about Google’s acquisition in 2008 of DoubleClick, which the states have called “the leading provider of the ad server tools” that media publishers and others use to sell display advertising inventory.
Google countered that neither Brin nor Pichai were “intimately involved in the DoubleClick acquisition or the subsequent product development at issue in this case.” Google said many other witnesses have more knowledge about how Google integrated DoubleClick.
YouTube’s Mohan already has faced 14 hours of questioning, Google told the court, and should not be subjected to the “undue burden he would experience sitting for a deposition for a third time.”
Google faces a number of other government and private antitrust lawsuits over various business practices, including its app store Play.
Trial in the Texas lawsuit is set for next March, and Google is preparing for a September trial in the Justice Department’s digital ads case in Virginia.
The case is State of Texas et al v. Google LLC, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, No. 4:20-cv-00957-SDJ.
For plaintiffs: W. Mark Lanier of The Lanier Law Firm; and Ashley Keller of Keller Postman
For defendant: R. Paul Yetter of Yetter Coleman; Eric Mahr of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer; and Daniel Bitton of Axinn Veltrop & Harkrider
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