Google is supporting the FIDO U2F standard just like Yubikey now.

They pay upwards of $100k+ per year to have a seat on the board and direct the "standard" to suit their products.

Your comment reads as if you believe that having an authentication standard that suits the products of the largest webmail provider is somehow bad. I'm having trouble understanding this. Better suiting the use-case of things like gmail seems like unequivocally a good thing. (As does the consortium being better funded by $100k+ a year, for that matter.)