That's a double-edged sword here. The current problem with search, and one of the reasons the exact algorithms stay undisclosed, is not Google. It's your average Joe the small business owner, who sees no problem with poisoning the Internet with spam and fake websites, just to gain a competitive edge. There's even a whole industry (SEO/SEM) serving such Joes, that specializes in extreme "meddling with search results". As long as Google maintains some control over it, it can tweak and twist their algorithms to counteract the manipulation, or even explicitly penalize biggest offenders. Take that control away and the Internet will go to shit.

Search is a common resource, and it needs to be managed. I'm far more willing to trust Google than a mob of hundreds of millions "entrepreneurs" trying to one-up one another at the cost of everyone else.