That's been obvious for the better part of a decade now. People will scream bloody murder, and not without good cause, but it's either going to happen, or there's no point in even pretending to regulate public utility monopolies.
You can always use one of dozens of other search engines.
That won't help Google any more than it helped Microsoft.
I'd love to see the comparison as to how Microsoft's strong-arming of VARs to sell only their products and Google's penalizing RG for attempting to subvert their search engine rankings relate.
Put another way: exactly what about Google could they (practically) regulate and will have sufficient public support?
In essence the problem tis about Google being able to wield disproportionate power through it's rankings and our common sense telling us that they will eventually abuse this if left unchecked; but that they aren't abusing this too blatantly just yet.
Not that that's of any help for people like my friend who ran a (handwritten) long tail content generation company which worked hard to stay within Google's guidelines yet had the company he and 3 friends had worked on for 4 years destroyed overnight just months ago when someone at Google decided they didn't like the content and penalized every single one of his clients.
They've been tailoring search results to cut out the specialized aggregators, like including their own shopping results above other stores.
The obvious one you've probably seen recently is movies. They now show the actors, related films and rankings, depriving views and ad space from the sites that offered that information.
They've also been doing it with maps for years for search terms like 'x in y city' as well as entering the ratings business. This content is often poor, but I imagine every click into an aggregator is a loss to google as the ad spend potentially goes on that aggregator instead of google.
You could see all of these are attempting to circumvent other businesses and abusing their monopoly. But I imagine none of these businesses want to complain as to be shut out of Google on the internet is death. You can't tell google to not steal your content, without telling them to not list your content.
They seem to justify it with claims that they're just giving searchers what they want, but in the end they own the highways, and now they seem to be putting their own facades up in front of a significant number of the businesses along the highway too which means they have to advertise on google just to get above google's own internal adverts.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but actual search results often seem to appear a very, very long way down the page on a lot of terms these days.
If I want the weather in a city I'm visiting, why wouldn't I want it on the google page, instead of another click away?
The rest of the Internet has no natural right to views and clicks sent their way from google. If google gives users the best search results (among the more than half-dozen credible search engines), users will use them. Do enough hostile things to users and users will go elsewhere. If their competition improves while they stay stagnant, they will also start to lose market share.
Google is improving Google's offering. That's laudable, because it helps Google's users and Google's financials.