It's actually hard to see how Google _can_ keep a level playing field under these circumstances, short of totally isolating their Motorola unit from long-term Android development.
They operate in so many markets they have to have internal chinese walls between departments. The ads team is separated from search team, and the search team is separate from their analytics team. Google knows that these internal teams would have conflicts of interests so it keeps them separate.
Why do I get adverts when I search if they are totally separate? It's all connected to the adverts, surely. That's the driving force for the company isn't it?
The SERP doesn't take into account advertiser information, so by advertising on Google you can't get a higher "organic" listing. The algorithms aren't allowed to interact, Google Ads team even has their own crawler bot.
By giving LG, Samsung, HTC the same access as Motorola. They shouldn't be any more isolated than the Android partners, which already have a great deal of access.
You think Google will share future plans etc. with all of those? Might as well broadcast it on Google.com since Apple, MS,HP, RIM, etc. will anyway get wind of it.
Reminds me of the Windows 95 and MS Office fiasco which resulted in Word Perfect suing them.
There are two different issues you're trying to discuss here, and it's getting muddled.
[1] The degree of Motorola's access/influence and the degree of the partners' (HTC/LG/Samsung/Etc) access/influence.
We don't know what will happen, but it's likely that the partners will have the same access and influence to Google/Android that they always did. Google is going to "run Motorola as a separate business".
[2] The non-partners that don't license android still won't have any access/influence.
The fact that non-partners won't gain more access/influence to Google/Android because of the acquisition is a non-story. Also a non-story: pigs wont fly as a result of this acquisition.
