That is not the only form of regulation, and not the form that would be applied here. This would be after the fact, going after companies that try to pull things like this.

In normal competitive situations this rule wouldn't apply. If one company wants the assets and employees of another company they can go ahead and buy it. And any company can offer better jobs as plain old jobs. The negotiation here was not just some high end job openings.

These were regular old job offers. At any time, any of the employees could have stayed at Windsurf instead of taking a lot more money from Google.

Google didn’t want the “assets”. Google wanted the people. Even then they only wanted the best people.

They were not.

> Google didn’t want the “assets”.

They paid 2.4 billion in licensing fees. Or something like that, looks like part of that was special structured not a regular old job offer money.