My point is that reporting must be accurate and factually correct.

Google's showing their hand. You're here nitpicking. If something CAN be done, it usually WILL be done, especially if the actor is a business and the reward is power, influence, or profit.

Will you be one of the ones 'giving Google a chance' once they play their hand next year?

Because that agenda is hypothesis based on outsiders' observation of what Google is doing. It needs to be based on facts. Without facts, such an "agenda" is really just speculation and fear-mongering, not much better than the likes of Breitbart News.

Speculation like this is easy. I can also just speculate that the Ars has an agenda to slander Google. Expand that to a couple hundred words and you have an article. Now get people to read it and become angry. That's basically the sorry state of online journalism.

I have unsubscribed from Ars.

Can you name a single thing Google's done that's earned them trust?

I'm more of a technologist than a product guy so I care more about the technologies coming out of Google. When I see major open source efforts like tensorflow or k8s I see goodwill and trust. Outside the realm of software, when I see principles or ideas or algorithms like CoDel, BBR congestion control, and SPDY (later becoming HTTP/2) and even later QUIC, MASQUE, I see the same (please excuse me for listing networking technologies because that's where my recent interests are). Here's a very simple thought experiment: if all the above technologies came from a different company say Cloudflare would you consider these earning them trust? The answer is an unequivocal yes.

The only reason why you might be unable to name a single thing Google did to earn them trust is perhaps because of rampant brainwashing by the anti-Google rhetoric.