This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
Yup corrupt companies likely do it all the time. Technically it’s perjury to lie in a court but outside of being caught or going to hell it’s not much of a deterrent.
There isn’t much recourse against that other than trying to skirt detection by these companies (not possible or feasible in the long term) or to be in a country that is strongly against or an enemy of the one(s) those companies are in or allied with.