I think if Google attempted to download the entirety of JSTOR with the express intent of making the full dataset freely available, then Google would also face legal consequences.
It's true, and relevant, that Google would feel those consequences much less sharply than Swartz did.
Don't buy into the rhetoric and call it "consequences". It's always a choice to sue, a choice to prosecute, and this would be true even if these choices were made consistently and impartially (which they certainly aren't).
I wasn't meaning to attach a pejorative to "consequences", but the word does typically have that meaning so you're right to call me out. Perhaps "resulting legal issues" would be a better way to put it.
For the record, I think the consequence was grossly disproportionate to the action.
Google Scholar explicitly made direct deals with publishers to scrape their content, with the constraint that while they can use the content to serve search results in Scholar, but cannot show the content of the papers on the site- just titles and short fragments that match. the deals were tenuous and I had to step carefully around my plan to use that database to implement large-scale scientific search over the literature (this was a long time before anybody was seriously considering using LLMs on research data).
I've spoken to several very wealthy/powerful people and tried to get them to negotiate a large-scale content license with the various publishers that would allow researchers and individuals to access more research in lower-friction ways. None of them (NIH, Schmidt, etc) were really interested.
It's true, and relevant, that Google would feel those consequences much less sharply than Swartz did.