They had the market position and option to do that for years now. "Told you so" whenever a patterns matches, and ignoring the times when it does not instead of providing a good model that encompasses both, is a fairly lame way to reason about the world.
The position is always, Google's position is so strong they can do whatever they want even if it isn't beneficial to users, this confirms that. I'm not sure the "they could have abused this sooner" defense is a good one.
