Probably so. But what relevance does "legally required" have in a country sliding into autocracy?

Because it’s important context for understanding what the “point” of the article is. It could be any of:

- reporting on google’s violation of privacy laws or handing over info they weren’t required to

- reporting on the US government’s abuse of existing process that Google was legally required to comply with but ought to have challenged

- calling attention to investigatory legal practices that are normal and above-board but the author of the article wishes they were otherwise.

Some of these are motives are closer to the journalism end of the spectrum and some of them are closer to advocacy. I interpret this article as the third bucket but I wish it were clearer about the intent and what they are actually attempting to convey. The fact that the article is not clear about the actual law here (for example, was this a judicial subpoena?) makes me trust it less.

It reflects even worse on Google for vacuuming up and keeping the data.

They can’t really refuse to hand over the data, but they could purge and stop collecting identifying data on Americans. As is, they are tacitly complicit by collecting data they know will be used against protesters.

giant private companies like Google are not ever going to be involved with defying court orders, especially ones that do lots of business with the federal government (which will be just about any company even half of google's size). You can say it's wrong or whatever but it's like asking a brick wall to do an Irish jig.

The only solution to this problem is for the US to have a vastly more active anti-monopoly regime so that companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. are simply not allowed to exist at such scales where consumers are locked into them.

Let's be real, if a bigtech ignored judicial orders, whether you would describe it as "fighting autocracy" or "corporate fascism" is 100% dependent on who is currently in office

Google is a multi trillion dollar company, not a scrappy libertarian upstart ready to gamble everything in court