Basically the law says you need to do the assessment if you're removing the trees permanently from over 200 hectares. The company asked for an exemption, the relevant bureau said nope, they cut anyway.
It's not about trees.
It's about fairness.
It's also about the fact these processes are in place to stop large companies causing environmental damage.
It can be argued "a few trees isn't much" but it's about the entire protective mechanism to stop, say mining companies, to wantonly ravage the landscape.
If one company can do it, it means the system isn't implementing the protection the voters would like to have for nature.
Hence it's a quite political hot potato.
It is a nothingburger from the fairness point as well. People knowingly and unknowingly violate a lot of permitting processes all the time and in many cases never suffer any consequences even if discovered, unless they have zealous neighbors.
While things can fall through cracks your disregard for regulation does not really apply as a fair example to the milieu.
You are here repeating the same argument that goes "it's only a crime if you get caught".
This is a specific philosophy of law.
Now while rule of law has different meanings depending on the country where you live, in a nordic democracy like Finland legislation exists for the benefit of public good, and acting by these laws is one of the foundational expectations in the society.
The fact they are recognized to serve the public good, means everyone is expected to follow them, and not following them is not only a process error, but in fact, deeply immoral.
I do realize different countries operate differently and somewhere else laws are not necessarily about trying to achieve philosophical good outcomes for the population.
But in Finland "well it's the law but who follows those things" argument is not common sense rule of thumb but considered wanton disregard of public good - which everyone considers to be a shared responsibility to maintain.
My claim is that Google is getting unfair (in their favor) treatment is incorrect, because average Elias will also get no or next to no negative consequences making a very similar mistake on average Elias's scale.
1) The same consequences are probably a lot less "next to no" on Elias's scale.
2) As Uncle Joe is said to have said, "enough quantity becomes a quality of its own". Google-scale chopping down trees is not just a little bigger, it's so much bigger that it becomes a fundamentally different thing than Elias-scale wrong composting.
So yes, anything short of shutting down any plans for new Google data centers in Finland[1] is Google getting favourable treatment; that claim is not incorrect.
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[1]: And preferably shutting down any existing ones, too. Just so they, and others like them, maybe will learn.
To be clear my intent is not to misrepresent your statement, just to explain how I hear it.
"I am talking about fairness of application of law"
But there is no fairness in application of law?
The law is the law. Just like 1 + 1 is 2, the role of the legal process is to compute this. And it should apply to same to any party that is active in a legal process.
Why would that in itself make it a "non-story"?