Earlier quoted context omitted.
These weren't contract clauses; they were direct conspiracy between top execs via email. > One email exchange recounted how Jobs asked Schmidt to stop Google from trying to hire one of Apple's engineers. "I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this," Jobs wrote to Schmidt on March 7, 2007.
I'm curious why governments aren't held to this standard of conspiracy the are caught being "very pleased" if private companies did this or that to stifle various freedoms. If JS was honest and a comedian he'd bring something like this up to the FTC rather than give the federal government a nice ego massage.
In the situation you're hinting at, social media companies regularly and frequently said "no" to those requests. That does not appear to have been the case in the Google/Apple non-compete conspiracy.
In other words, it's only a conspiracy if both sides conspire.