Surprising that you're the first to mention the most obvious answer which is that with the search deal ended, there is less affordance to "play nice" with competitive browsers. This is not at all unusual and perhaps before there was more consideration given to have their mobile offering work on one of their largest commercial search partners.
Also, lot's of people are lamenting the seeming betrayal of "don't be evil" but I think it really hasn't been about that for a while. Google has bigger ambitions to change the world now as their investment in driverless cars, medical devices, VR, etc. has shown. Those ideas require large capital investment and anything they can do to generate more revenue to fund those truly game-changing ideas are probably seen as fair (regardless of whether they adhere to an open internet/standards based approach). One day, we'll all see that the "ends justify the means" or so we hope.
Also, lot's of people are lamenting the seeming betrayal of "don't be evil" but I think it really hasn't been about that for a while. Google has bigger ambitions to change the world now as their investment in driverless cars, medical devices, VR, etc. has shown. Those ideas require large capital investment and anything they can do to generate more revenue to fund those truly game-changing ideas are probably seen as fair (regardless of whether they adhere to an open internet/standards based approach). One day, we'll all see that the "ends justify the means" or so we hope.