It's unequivocally a positive if they play by the rules. They fell foul of Europe(who was protecting it's consumers).

Google's not a charity and made the choices they made to get to where they are. Making Android free ensured they quickly became relevant in the emerging mobile market without having to invest massive amounts in designing/making/manufacturing devices (alongside the risks), if doing Apple way. Or if they went the MS way and tried to sell a closed source OS to device manufacturers, those device manufacturers may instead have chosen a different, more polished OS from a company who had more experience/better reputation in that field.

> Google places some terms of use to their software and suddenly they're being "anti-competitive."

You can drop the scare quotes, it's not "anti-competitive", it's just anti-competitive.

I don't support either, but there is a clear reason why what google did got caught by anti trust laws.