Sounds like clickbait: an idea so wild it just might work!

The idea is that the US would require Google to make its search index publicly available for anyone to use.

Wouldn't this be taking something that belongs to Google, though?

Not really. The search index is a collection of keywords and other data from websites created by other people and other companies — not Google.

This would be interesting, and API access could be a revenue stream. But it feels unlikely.