It's not just Google, it doesn't matter if the company in change is all sunshine and rainbows today, who knows what they will do tomorrow (looking at you freenode). Centralized level of control like this is anathama to the whole future of the web.

I feel like you picked a bad example because while Freenode is a centralized service the community immediately routed around the crazy in the span of like two weeks. Centralization isn't really that big of a problem in practice, it's lock-in.