For years now–since Imeem days at least–I’ve been wondering why it is that the top videos in Google search results were always from YouTube (or from Vevo through YouTube).  Like many others, including…let’s see…Senator Mike Lee and the European Commission for starters…I just assumed that Google was stacking the deck to favor YouTube, its wholly owned subsidiary.

According to Brad Stone writing in Bloomberg, a newly released study by Tim Wu (“Is Google Degrading Search?  Consumer Harm from Universal Search”) explains the phenomenon and further backs Google into an antitrust corner.  The study’s thesis is that “Google is able to leverage its dominance in search to gain customers for [Google’s competing] content.  This yield’s serious concerns if the internal content is inferior to organic search results.”  Brad Stone reported:

Google is facing a new high-profile adversary in the roiling fight over whether its monolithic search engine violates antitrust law: Columbia…