Well, I'd say it does. My understanding is that if you're not limited in what you're thinking, but severely limited in how you are allowed to think about it, your freedom of thought is limited nonetheless.
And it's limited, by necessity, even outside working hours, lest your tongue/fingers slip and you utter a bad word in your Googler capacity so that a liable deed gets a liable name and there won't be any lawyering around this.
Heck, it's almost, though not entirely, like a brainwashing cult!
I guess in China they also force their Uighur camp operators to not even think about what they do as "torture", but "reeducation". It makes them happier in their workplace.
How people think about things and what people put in legally discoverable media like email are worlds apart. As a basic aspect of corporate survival, it's important to keep that in mind.
The overarching concept is "don't make it hard for the company to do business." The point of those trainings is that the words to avoid have legally-defined meanings that may or may not be what the Googler intended, but are likely to be interpreted in an antitrust sense in a court of law. The underlying concept is "don't talk like a lawyer if you're not one of our lawyers."
Watching what you put in email (as described in this article) is in the same training where Googlers are given the overarching advice "always communicate via email as if those emails are going to show up on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow."
The fact alone that there exists such an extensive training specifically about monopoly-related stuff hints that there is extensive monopolistic behavior liability for which only hinges on whether it's acknowledged as such in the internal communication.
Also, it adds a whole new (new?) meaning to any press release or a blog post from Google using any of the terms from the right column if you substitute them with the terms from the left column. They say "dedicated to providing the best services to our users", you see "dedicated to eliminating our competitors".
Someday you will participate in a legal proceeding, and you will feel silly about writing this. I wish I could have those days back, when I believed that lawyers wouldn't twist words out of context, or construct entire alternate realities from a few found seed words.
But they do, and the good ones are really good at it.
Any competent company is going to train its people with some sort of variation on a course named "The Ten Dumbest Things You Can Write In An Email So Don't".
This is sound advice not only for corporate survival; you should also keep this in mind in personal communications. Even your private communications with your closest friends could be leaked years later if you somehow manage to cross the wrong people, and Internet mobs are every bit as capable as the smartest lawyers at constructing alternate realities from a few found seed words; or maybe they’re not as capable, but the bar of acceptance is also far lower.
And it's limited, by necessity, even outside working hours, lest your tongue/fingers slip and you utter a bad word in your Googler capacity so that a liable deed gets a liable name and there won't be any lawyering around this.
Heck, it's almost, though not entirely, like a brainwashing cult!
I guess in China they also force their Uighur camp operators to not even think about what they do as "torture", but "reeducation". It makes them happier in their workplace.