> They can say they'd have Google's business if Google hadn't signed NDAs, learned their trade secrets, then decided to do it in-house.

This seems like the issue to me, they can say they'd have Google's Loon business. But that's 0 actual business. I don't see how they can possibly claim they'd have Google's advertising business since it's obviously completely unrelated to what they do.

The money Google invested in loon can be argued to be less than Google would have paid to buy in the tech. This puts a nice lower bound number on the lost opportunity.