Anyway, on the topic, none of the reasons presented in the article seem compelling. Government regulation should step in when consumers have no choice but to us

Anyway, on the topic, none of the reasons presented in the article seem compelling. Government regulation should step in when consumers have no choice but to use something that has achieved a monopoly, and the payment networks mentioned do make a more compelling case. It seems inappropriate for regulation to step in when something happens to be popular but there are equal or better alternatives easily available, and changing to a different search engine is about the easiest change a person could make in their life. In the case of mitigating any bad behavior by Google, there's a very easy alternative solution for the problem, which is to convince people to use other search engines. I haven't used Google as mine for over 15 years and I don't believe I've suffered at all for it. I've found DuckDuckGo to perfectly suit my needs. Google run as a public utility could potentially hurt all the other search engines that many would consider to be superior solutions already.