If you don't like the way Google does business, you are free to not do business with them, either as an employee or customer. I don't understand your snark.
Apple's involvement was particularly egregious: they threatened to destroy adobe with spurious patent litigation unless they participated. Google executives also explicitly acknowledged that there actions were illegal and directed staff to keep discussions about it out of email.
The companies basically got a slap on the wrist: the settlement was a tiny fraction of direct saving the cartel members enjoyed from wage fixing. Almost no incentive to not do it again, just next time don't leave emails explicitly acknowledging your criminal activities.
Their actions didn't just hurt their own employees, they depressed wages industry wide. After the scheme stopped these companies reset their pay scales. I got a substantial increase in pay even though I was not working for a participating company and worked on the clear other side of the country (I worked for a company HQed in Sunnyvale and who heavily competed in that job market).
My impression (from the emails that were quoted in the news at the time) was that Steve Jobs was the driving force behind it. All the other participants seemed to just go along with it. Still wrong, but I doubt it would have happened without Jobs pushing it.
a point often overlooked. Every working person in the industry was hurt by this.
It's astounding to me that people would continue to want to work there, given that it is now public knowledge that Google will try to cheat you out of wages.
Better yet, why isn't all cartelization prohibited?
Unless we abolish corporations as a concept, how exactly do you effectively propose that we "outlaw all cartelization" in a way that isn't just outlawing unions while keeping capital interests unified?
tl;dr: unions complement the inherrent concentration of capital interests in modern ecconomies and are no more inherently like cartels than the corporate form itself.
You don't have to write some sort of universal program that can take a textual description of a situation and spit out "guilty/not guilty". You can make laws stating a thing, which a bunch of motivating text, and then direct prosecution against things that are against the spirit of the thing, and get judges to follow it (either through rulings, or if that fails, adding extra laws to make it even clearer what is up).
It's a social thing, not a logical contradiction gotcha. "Corporations may not engage in anti-competitive behaviour. Corporations who act as such shall be liable under anti-trust statues as if they operated as one. Also, price-fixing is not allowed." Then society and the rest fills in the blanks
Your statement is accurate when a healthy market and competitors exist but you are not free to avoid doing business with Google since they have an insane amount of market control.
The benefits of _not_ using google's index does not make up for it. So unless there some other benefit from doing so, not using google's index merely makes your business less competitive.
The choices are not just "like it or leave it". Another is to recognize that the options being presented are unreasonable, and that the entire situation should be changed to make it impossible.
I agree that the solution is stronger labor laws. I disagree vehemently that people should be forced to relocate as a condition of those stronger labor laws.
And you are free to discuss bad behaviors publicly. I don't understand your snark.