It's not clear what you are suggesting with the power questions.
Breaking up Google?
As for whether society should trust Google's intentions: I hope not. Society should be, in general, distrustful of corporations, and, for the most part, they are. That doesn't mean Google doesn't have good intentions, or that one should assume bad faith everywhere. At the same time, what was questioned originally was the operation of that corporation and it's people, and that's what i responded to :)
As for the adoption of the motto: The original outside publication of this was done while going public, and was intended to make clear to wall street that Google wasn't going to maximize profit at the expense of everything else, where everything else usually involves doing morally questionable things.
I think you read way too much into it.
"But I do not for a second believe that Google's executives are so much better than all other good people running large corporations that actually do evil. Because, hey -- power corrupts."
All I would say to this is I hope you get to meet them some day. Except for one, I can say they really are better than all the other good people i've met running other large corporations. They are honestly good people, and honestly care about doing right.
In the end, I guess we just disagree. I don't believe Google has become a big problem, and I don't think Google needs a lot of help from the outside to protect them from themselves.
In fact, I think help from "the outside" would make things a lot worse.
For example, the last time I looked, the outside wants Google to try to detect when people are doing bad things, and report them.