Google doesn't "own" the project in any meaningful sense. That was Russ' entire point of this post. Could Google assert control if they wanted to? I guess. But that's no unique to just Go. Remember the XFree86 drama, for example? Probably a number of other examples to be found.
The issue here seems to be primarily one of trust. I can relate to that, as I don't like Google either, and actually mostly avoided Go for exactly that reason until I got hired as a Go developer a few years ago. I found that the Go project in particular is developed and managed in a fairly reasonable way; certainly much better than some other popular Google projects such as Android (the open parts of it anyway) or Chromium.
In other words, I think you should give them a chance, rather than immediately go "corporate Google overlords".
