The problem is the only way to combat Google in this regards would be for smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork. (The train has already left the station for anything besides WebKit or Blink, since the lack of accessibility of Gecko means it will never be adopted by anyone else.)

But most of them are directly financed by Google and have almost no common ground (e.g. Opera, Firefox).

And unfortunately no single player involved can gain much by going against Google. What would Microsoft gain from forking? Nothing.

I think 10 years in the future we might see WebKit and Blink merge together into a single core engine.

Modern Capitalism almost dictates this development, as corporations strive to save money at all costs.