Google is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. Actually, the company is valued at 400 billion dollars. Being such a large company however, comes with its consequences. Google has suffered several accusations over the past few years.
These accusations have led to ongoing lawsuits against the company. These lawsuits range from security concerns to unfair working environments which have gained the attention of the public.
Bias Against Black Employees
April Curley, a former google black employee, filed a lawsuit against Google stating that the workplace environment favored white males. She described her experiences after working for Google for 6 years.
Ms. Curley explained that in her time at Google she was often confused with two other black female workers. She claimed that she and those workers were never allowed to speak up or present in meetings or speak up in general about what was going on internally.
It was also claimed that qualified black employees were deemed “not Googly enough”. This is a term that was often used to offend and discriminate against these employees.
The lawsuit also claims that Google purposely hired black employees to lower paying jobs than appropriate for their experience which allowed for those workers to be underpaid. The company also purposely made interview questions more difficult for prospective black employees. This led to less black employees being hired for the correct positions or not being hired at all.
Google’s unfair hiring practices also probably led to their concerning diversity report. They claim to have 4.4 percent of black+ employees in the U.S. The plus includes people who identify as more than one race, one of those being black. This is far below the national average of 9.1 percent for companies relating to digital publishing and search.
Ms. Curley hopes to gain compensation for current and former black employees. She also hopes the lawsuit will return employees to their rightful positions.
Antitrust Violations
In recent months there have been many lawsuits stating that Google has become a monopoly; specifically relating to their extremely popular Google Playstore. One lawsuit for example stated that Google controls 90 percent of the Android App market.
They continue to say that Google prevents smaller app stores from gaining traction by not allowing other app stores to be downloaded off of the Google Playstore. In addition, Google does not allow ads for other app stores to be played on any of their platforms such as Google Search and YouTube.
In their effort to stop the Samsung Galaxy Store from gaining traction, they offered to pay Samsung an undisclosed amount of money to stop them from making exclusive deals with large deals with popular apps, according to the lawsuit.
Of course, Google has come up with an elaborate defense to disprove all claims from the lawsuit. Read the full statement here.
In sum, Google says that their playstore is actually more open than most others. They say that most of their devices actually come pre downloaded with more than one app store. They also say that any app can be obtained by sideloading the app (downloading the app directly from the creator from a source other than the Google Playstore).
In response to the complaints about the Google Playstore forcing developers to pay 15 to 30 percent commission sales on digital goods and services, Google says this only applies to a small percentage of developers.
They state that only 3 percent of developers actually sell these goods and services. Those people are the ones subject to the fee. They say that this is necessary to keep the balance in the app store ecosystem because it allows small developers to grow and have an opportunity to compete.
“This lawsuit isn’t about helping the little guy or protecting consumers. It’s about boosting a handful of major app developers who want the benefits of Google Play without paying for it.“
–Google
These are just a couple of the lawsuits against Google. Many others have even expressed their future plans to file their own lawsuits. Because of the company’s size there is many areas where things could go wrong as the lawsuits claim. As Google continues to grow in power it leaves us to wonder what really goes on behind the scenes.
