You may be right, but a company the size of Google may view the legal costs + bad press that they have to hire PR people to expunge from the minds of the commun

You may be right, but a company the size of Google may view the legal costs + bad press that they have to hire PR people to expunge from the minds of the community as a fairly trivial overall cost relative to sending a damning authoritarian style message that they will hit back hard. With nearly infinite money & power, it is hard to speculate what their ethical calculus is in a situation like this.