The difference, presumably, is that people inside Google are already talking about all kinds of other political issues on internal message boards. They want to believe they're different, that they're in a new kind of enlightened environment where politics can be discussed by reasonable people without danger.

But this is ridiculous. It's easy to talk about things for which there's wide agreement. You don't even notice those things as politics. It's only politics when you disagree.

I don't suppose the human beings at Google are any better at talking about this stuff than any other human beings. If they want their workplace policies to reflect that, then fine! But there are a whole bunch of implicitly accepted leftist positions that they shouldn't be talking about, either. That's the hard part, because, again, they don't even notice those positions as politics.

Here are some Google executives saying exactly this:

https://youtu.be/wa8nc27Jb8E

Just as Uber and AirBnb are slowly revealing why we had hotel and taxi regulations in the first place, this Google case shows why our grandparents established those old-fashioned ideas about politics in the workplace.