Tech has always been a cage fight among the companies involved. Microsoft spent decades being famously combative, until it was humbled by a near breakup of the company by the Justice Department. And anyone who thinks—as Uber executive Emil Michaelproposed last week, before apologizing—that digging up dirt on journalists is a novel tactic has a short memory. In 2006, in a bid to identify a leak’s source, Hewlett-Packard hired private investigators to obtain the phone records of journalists and the company’s own board members, which is a federal crime.

But...