Ultimately, a company has to have a compelling business interest to justify pursuing something like this. Until this became a public issue for these companies, it might be hard to argue that they'd be acting responsibly to pursue a legal case where the only result would be more detailed disclosure of these requests (not any change to the requests themselves.)
Google's arguably been the most active of the major tech firms in getting permission to disclose ranges of requests to date (has anyone else?); it's not clear there would have been a good business reason to pursue what may end up being a very expensive case if it proceeds all the way up through the court system.
And herein lies the issue of "companies exist solely to line the coffers of shareholders", with no responsibility to other stakeholders which is a narrow interpretation which had come about especially in the last 30 years or so. It's not a certain thing, although very common. Thorsten Veblen would call it a problem of remote capital, although other factors have also been at work since the 1960s.
For your statement to be relevant, you'd have to show that if they were concerned about stakeholders other than shareholders, they would have acted differently. That's not self-evident. It's not clear that this suit would have a material benefit for any stakeholders - including users - until now.
It would only do slightly more than the current disclosure to expose the issue of such requests, and it would incur significant risk and cost in return. Given the recent controversy, I'd say this suit now benefits Google employees and shareholders, but I'm not sure it really does a lot for customers in reality.
Let's say Google wins the right to disclose the exact number of requests instead of the range it's been reporting. Will that really materially improve the situation for users?
I do not see how your points are relevant to my argument.
Not everything needs material benefit. Symbolic benefit can be as structurally useful and beneficial as a countable material benefit. For if a powerful set of companies acts, the power relationship with the government (and consumers, not always beneficially of course) then changes.
the whole point is that Google did't ask before, so the benefit is less than it would have been had they (and others) acted earlier. I am suggesting this is because of a lack of real stakeholder accountability. The benefit to users now is still appreciable, even though they weren't looking after their customers' interests as strongly as perhaps they might have in another era.
Relevance to what? This is a most pertinent issue with respect to the actions of executives of a large business. If executives are competent, then if their concerns are broader, they will act. And there is certainly no requirement for me to demonstrate this in conversation such as this. Your statement appears to commit a burden of proof fallacy.
And the point I'm making (which you seem to miss) is that the value of taking this step has actually risen. Prior to PRISM, if Google did this, it would incur similar risks/costs but only a limited number of people would care. Post-PRISM, when it's a national issue, the PR benefit for it has risen tenfold, while none of the other prior benefits have decreased. Regardless of how they're prioritizing stakeholders, the overall balance of risk/reward has changed drastically, so it doesn't tell you much about which stakeholders were prioritized.
