It is Google's responsibility to be a positive actor in the Internet ecosystem on behalf of end-consumers. If not because it is the "right" thing to do and also essential to the long term vision and success of the company.

Let me be expository on this for a moment, please.

Right now there are three competing visions for the future of the internet:

1. The GNU vision: the internet becomes decentralized and every individual has the tools to replicate and manage small, individual infrastructural tasks.

2. The Google/Microsoft vision, where a series of non-government economic entities create centralized and competing infrastructure while being supervised by governments in the jurisdictions they operate in.

3. The Centrist vision where the internet is essentially a public utility and operated by a quasi-governmental agency or a series of joint governmental agencies.

Currently our Internet is somewhere between 2 and 3, with a lot of talented individuals trying to write software and doing research to make #1 more feasible.

But #1 is inherently never going to work. Moore's law should tip us off, if not the current state of affairs in the world. As software and computing get better, its rate of improvement (or just change, take your pick) increases. This means that it's progressively harder to stay abreast of security, devops, and software products. With the best of intentions but a quintessentially first-world outlook, #1 simply creates a series of digital under-classes and rewards the people with the huge time investment and economic support structure implied by people who are currently good at computers.

#3 could work, but it assumes that Governments ultimately start to shape up and actually reflect the collective will of their population (as contradictory as that can be). It's possible, but I'm a sceptical.

#2 is the closest to working, providing a tension between government and corporation that resembles the tensions present in the American constitution. What's more, economic and technical concerns reward this approach. It's cheaper to centralize computer infrastructure and when done correctly it's a huge cost and materials savings. Competition between said environments also works to keep Corporations focused on the people abandoned by approach #1, keeping their products approachable and with low overhead for starting up.

But if Google is seen to constantly violate their user trust and not act as a sufficiently strong user advocate, eventually the populace will demand scenario #3 be enacted (or something with so much governmental input that it is indistinguishable from #3) and we'll be in a terrible situation.

The biggest benefit to the current system is that Google, Microsoft, and even Baidu all have so much to lose. They need to be receptive to government arguments while all competing with each other.

So yes. Google needs to be a white knight in shining armour because they benefit from user trust in a big way. The benefit in the short term with better engagement and margins. They benefit in the long term with superior positioning and longevity for their corporate rights.