This is an excellent analogy because it is incumbent upon businesses to follow all the laws, including the ones they don't know about. That's one of the reasons "lawyer" is a profession.

Google doesn't have the force of law (it's in this context acting more like a Yelp: "1 star review --- our secret shopper showed up and the manager didn't give the secret 'we are not criminals' hand sign"), but the basic idea is the same: there is a complex web of interactions that can impact your online presence and experts in the field you can choose to hire for consulting or not.

Didn't used to be that way, but the web used to be a community of 100,000 people, not 5.6 billion. Everything gets more complicated when you add more people.