They make up a big enough proportion of the search market that whether or not they'd ultimately prevail, a move like that would tie them up in anti-trust battles for the next decade.
They can choose to not deliver "enhanced" search results -- showtimes, links to buy tickets, links to IMDB/RT/etc., that appear outside of the "native" search results.
As long as they don't mess around with the native search results, they'll be safer from an anti-trust perspective.
Doesn't matter - it'd still be "trivial" to put together a sufficiently complicated case to have it survive dismissal attempts and drag it out for years.
The point is they're not just at risk of losing an anti-trust battle, but simply of having their execs embroiled in it for years.
Because they very much have to toe the line of being "neutral" in their search results as to not enable all the sanctions/remedies that other search engine competitors (like Bing) to have merit. Were they to overtly use their position to "punish" the content companies in this way, they would be jumped on by regulators everywhere for abusing a monopoly power.
The sad reality is that torrent sites don't have large legal teams nor the public favor to win over judges and juries. In the mind of the public and lawmakers, they are punishing the "bad people". Any search provider will be able to continue this practice with impunity as long as they don't target people with real money.
However, Google already attempts to reward original content so if they could do it algorithmically to everyone (hence not disrupting the competitive marketplace) I think they'd be able to claim "oops."
They can and should be able to, but ever so often a government starts thinking that "oh, it's big enough that we should remind it we're bigger and claim it's a 'utility' or something". This kind of thing makes that argument easier.
