A likely tactic if this goes to litigation is to argue a combined halo effect and "rising tide lifts all boats", and assert that if the jury assigns penalties to the companies to award the benefits thereof to these high-falutin' Silicon Valley engineers, then all the trodden-upon blokes unfairly hammered elsewhere in this fine nation of ours would get their just and due market wages. Throw in talk of the Great Recession and how dare these companies perpetrate such outrages when these hard working less-compensated engineers were barely hanging onto their houses with some sob stories with real faces, and testimony from compensation experts that yes, if so-and-so in the Valley got their "fair" compensation that is 150% of their current level, then whosit in Podunk, Middle America would get at least a 15% bump as the overall scale goes up everywhere. Cue a "if I just had 10% more we would have kept the family farm" sob story, and the cartel could prevail in court and still lose in the court of public opinion, and end up paying more in PR, marketing and lobbying expenses to clean up the aftermath than they could have ever saved in just not setting up the cartel in the first place.

If this blows up into a viral meme of some sort, it becomes political Kryptonite for any politician coming anywhere close to various high-tech visa-related legislation, who won't want to associate with any members of the cartel until the issue blows over (probably in about a year or less). So all sorts of visas get snarled up for a year or two, tying up various projects, driving up costs of this even more.

There are some interesting PR angles that Apple and Google can engage in to nip this sort of trial-by-heart-tugs, but I bet they will get control on the media image and quash this whole affair in the mainstream news media well before it gets to that stage. If they can limit any fallout litigation and the media coverage especially to just within the industry itself and not let it seep out into severe regulatory sanctions or public consciousness, then the cost-benefit of the cartel will work out fine. I predict wrist-slap sanctions if any, and a successful management of the media image, as this is a nice example of how agency challenges work out in a large, complex system.