My point is that the assertion that Google are doing all the work in creating the data used by Bing is clearly false.
Clearly it's not 100%, but what percentage is it?
The user ends up visiting 1 out 1T possible URLs.
Google narrowed it down from 1T to 10 URLs (11 orders of magnitude).
The user narrowed it down from 10 to 1 URLs (1 order of magnitude).
Even if you measure this logarithmically, Google did 91% of the work, and the user did 9%. And the Microsoft people are arguing that it's totally justified because of that 9%.
Or you could measure it linearly, and argue that Google did 99.999999999% of the work because that's the percentage of the results they eliminated.
Either way, this is an extremely weak justification for taking a result of which 91% came from your direct competitor (when measured in the most charitable way).