If it's the politics of antitrust attention in Google's direction, then it can provide liability to Google. An employee saying in an email "Wow, they didn't want to sell to us so we crushed them. Antitrust folks won't like it but it's what they get for not selling to us."

That, or other language about "crushing" competition isn't going to play well when an antitrust investigation reveals it.

I'm not sure whichever poor PR department workers that got assigned the fallout of the Damore memo would agree with you.

>A ban on politics is not neutral.

Yes it is. Just because you set up a false choice of "you're with me or against me" doesn't mean the rest of us have to play your game. Yes there is such a thing as leaving politics out of the workplace.

>Talking about politics provides no liability to Google.

I don't know about that. Nevertheless, it also creates a toxic environment, because there are a lot of contentious cultural and political issues that elicit emotional reactions and the vast majority of people will have a a wide variety of nuanced opinions on those, so all you're doing is introducing strife and toxicity with no benefit to the business.

Hostile work environment