To be clear, I'm not saying that Google should break the law. Instead, I'm saying that it's clearly the case that there are some bad laws in the world, and that its perfectly reasonable for companies to engage in advocacy to have those laws changed, rather than just rolling over and accepting them, for example the way that American tech companies have been releasing reports on the requests for data that they receive from the government in order to raise awareness of the issue.

I'm not even saying this necessarily applies to this exact situation - maybe the laws in France that Google was in violation of are good laws, in which case hopefully Google loses its appeal.

It's just ridiculous to say that companies should always just do whatever government tells them to do without question.