<i>It's not a question of stopping manufacturers, it's a question of distorting the market with a phone that has an insurmountable advantage. Google can no longer be an honest broker. I assure you if HTC and Motorola had known about the Nexus neither one of them would have been so aggressive in developing their own Android phones.</i><p>HTC <i>makes</i> the Nexus.  You can't even buy an HTC phone from HTC, <a href="http://www.htc.com/us/where-to-buy" rel="nofollow">http://www.htc.com/us/where-to-buy</a> (but this may be a function of the US cell market, maybe you can buy from HTC directly in other countries), you have to buy it from a carrier, or in the case of the Nexus, from Google which ends up being carrier agnostic (once the carrier list is expanded).<p>If the nexus has an insurmountable advantage, it's HTC that can deliver on it even to other specific carriers.  I'm not even so sure what this insurmountable advantage is.  If these other manufacturers want to compete, they're going to need to start innovating.  And they can put less effort and money into innovation on the software side, because they can license android, and spend all that they would have spent on software on making their hardware better.