Any discomfort one may experience from that comment is misled, as the plain language clarified it’s not a threat.[1]

But more seriously, Google would not have to stop providing search.

For the most part, the code of conduct in question is regarding “content” while you’re talking about search engine results.

Google as a News Portal slurps content from publisher sites and you can get a gist of the news without leaving Google (see also Google’s AMP technology push which looked scarier at the time this dust up started).

Remember Google has sites such as https://news.google.com/, and remember how content creators and curators were not sure how upset to be over what Google did with Yelp reviews and the like. Using Google today, fewer and fewer searches return plain SERPs.

Certainly there are a couple sites in EU and elsewhere mad at having their search result links show up without getting paid for them, and for that, well, they should google robots.txt.

SERP snippets are one thing, structured content someone else spent money to bring together is another. For the most part, this is about usage of content.

1. Footnote: “Consequences of continuing to post here may include, but are not limited to, having additional postings posted.”