What I see is a lot of very sincere dedicated engineers coming up with helpful & rich ideas. Web Engineers seem to have
enormous power to suggest & follow & drive forward ideas they seem to think are interesting. I see very few hallmarks signs of top down control. I see far more individual folks promoting & driving ideas, with blink-dev as a great testament to that bottom-up engineering spirit/mentality.
Which of these Standards do you think Google will use to "control the web"? https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
There's been an unmitigated use of Fear Uncertainty & Doubt, played with great effectiveness, against the top player. People keep ascribing to Google the role of platform-controller, like literally everyone else in history has done: IBM, Apple, Microsoft, all of which have used OSes to maintain control & dominance. Google is a search engine; they benefit from a rich healthy powerful competitive web. If Google did have "control" over the web, what would they do? What's the evil mastermind plan here?
Everything Google does goes through the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and Security review. It's all open process. The checks are very real; even if no one can prevent them from implementing it would look very bad to disregard feedback, and thusfar they have not. Thusfar there seem to be extremely few examples of actual real scary things done. Web MIDI shipping without permissions was the most "egg on face" thing Google's done, and I have a hard time interpreting that as malicious. It has the hallmark of naively hopeful to me, and was easy enough to address.
The desire to see the browser teams as the enemy, as a foe, is a greatly harmful & reductive and alas popular outlook in my view. I don't think it's warranted, I don't think there's real evidence for it, and I stress again, Google has so far set the gold-standard for web standards accountability. They wouldn't have done that, they wouldn't continue that process, if they wanted to take control. The case here for taking-over seems absurd, has no clear outcome & only risk. Taking control is an existential risk, would jeopardize the web's success, could easily kill the Golden Goose that has made Google so wealthy & wise. People's fear here does not make business sense.