The NYC article isn't really about a hypothetical. It's about foundem.com's battle with Google over maybe being lowered in Google's rankings because they are a rival search engine.
Whether Google should be punished for that, assuming it's true, or left to rank things as they like is more the debate.
Perhaps they should be free to do as they choose, but make what they are doing very explicit. In the early days Google heavily promoted the idea that their rankings were independent and free of commercial biases, and we now implicitly assume that's true. If that's not the case, then perhaps we enforce explicitness about that - somehow.
Whether Google should be punished for that, assuming it's true, or left to rank things as they like is more the debate.