The subject of the antitrust suits filed against Facebook came up in a Facebook comment thread for me yesterday.
Some guy piped up and stated, essentially, that "Zuckerberg is too rich and too big and nothing will happen.". He evidently had never heard of Standard Oil or Ma Bell.
It's no secret that many news articles these days are simply paid advertisements. Generally, I avoid the Big N mainstream "news providers" and stick to some combo of HN, twitter and reddit just to name a few.
Standard procedure has been: if you want their investment or their business, you have to surrender your data/IP upon request.
And they probably came to these Biotech companies with a juicy offering of capital. So expect some Biotech breakthroughs in the near future, but not necessarily coming from the West.
If Google proceeded per the government's wishes for these reasons, that sets an interesting precedent.
Companies would be able to implement features they deem to be ethically questionable, so long as they or the public determined that "it's what the customer wanted, anyway".
Companies foreign to China cooperate with the local government for another reason also: they want access to Chinese customers.
If Google were to refuse the Chinese terms of business, they would be barred from doing business with the largest population in the world. And the climate over there is that their government risks little political capital in banning non-compliant firms.
Some guy piped up and stated, essentially, that "Zuckerberg is too rich and too big and nothing will happen.". He evidently had never heard of Standard Oil or Ma Bell.