I've noticed this in many companies, but at Google it does seem particularly worse. In private conversations with friends, I will at least be cognizant of the bad things that the company I work for is doing - it's just a job.

But many Googlers seem to perfectly fit that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

That said, I don't think you can see how Alphabet's lawyers talk and think that they are somehow living in a bubble or are not having these sorts of high-level strategy discussions.

I have zero experience at the levels of Google when it comes to market dominance. But I do have some for certain niche products in the chemical sector, where I worked for one of two suppliers in exostence. And there I, a simple low level team lead, received dedicated anti-trust training. Including what wording to use in e-mails and what words to avoid. So I would guess, Google is much more prudent and higher management levels, especially since this discussion is nothing new.

Googlers are definitely trained what language to use and not to use. Though I think there is still a cognitive dissonance where they believe they're just avoiding problematic statements as opposed to avoiding admitting blatantly illegal behavior.

Why would a company believe it's doing illegal stuff? That wouldn't make much sense unless it's made out of people that are OK with doing illegal stuff (Mafia?). So of course most employees don't believe that.

And whether or not such training is meant by executives to hide illegal behavior that they are aware of it's also catching many cases where people are just dumb and use wrong words to mean different things, words that have specific meaning in a legal context and that can hurt the person and the company although there was no illegal act being done.