It would be bad thing if competition in this area devolves into this sort of conspiratorial atmosphere. While competition is great to have as it pushes positive change and innovation, it is worrying in this instance for its ability to degrade the usefulness of search engines.

He mentioned (in the video of this at least) that it could be used as a bargaining chip to Google which makes a lot of sense, so I suspect Google will immediately be part of the game.

I doubt it somewhat - Google isn't the kind of company that likes to be in the position of dependence on anybody else.