A company being legally allowed to do something doesn't implicitly make that thing fair or ethical. You can simultaneously believe that Google has the right to

A company being legally allowed to do something doesn't implicitly make that thing fair or ethical. You can simultaneously believe that Google has the right to quash any paper, and believe that doing so arbitrarily is unfair. So yes, she was treated unfairly. And that's absolutely relevant to people's decision making. Like, what do you think it's irrelevant in relation to? Its not clear what you mean by publicly, nothing was done outside of Google until after she was fired.