And what happens next is precisely what is supposed to happen when companies don’t collude to defraud their employees of fair-market wages: Google coughed up more money to improve its retention.
I'm not so sure that they're clueless. Even if they lose the lawsuit and pay whatever fines they're slapped with, they might still come out on top, with all the revenues they squeezed out of their workforce during the collusion.
When you're an executive, you have many problems. It's pretty common to deal with the immediate one and create a whole host of other ones. One could argue that that's how it should be, because otherwise you're irresponsibly avoiding what you should be doing.
And what happens next is precisely what is supposed to happen when companies don’t collude to defraud their employees of fair-market wages: Google coughed up more money to improve its retention.