EC Wants Google to Break Up Search Engine from Other Businesses
The European Union Parliament has passed a resolution calling for a break up of Google. The motion was passed on Thursday with 384 votes to 174, and 56 abstentions.
The resolution supports a single digital market across Europe and wants tech companies to separate their search engines from other business operations.
The resolution wants the European Commission "to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services" over time, reports zdnet.com.
It wants EU "to prevent any abuse in the marketing of interlinked services by operators of search engines", adding: "Indexation, evaluation, presentation and ranking by search engines must be unbiased and transparent."
The resolution is not binding on the member countries and does not mention the name of Google but the search engine company has the largest market share with Bing and Firefox coming in very far behind in the race.
The European Commission is already investigating Google under the antitrust laws as it believes its search practices are anticompetitive and discriminatory against other rival search engines.
Fines have been imposed and settled but the process has been long and unsatisfactory with Google and the Commission not arriving at any consensus.
The United States will be unhappy with the resolution and had earlier asked the EC to reconsider the decision. The US House judiciary committee chairman Bob Goodlatte had earlier written in a letter saying that the MEPs were "encouraging antitrust enforcement efforts that appear to be motivated by politics, rather than grounded in factual and legal principles", reports the Financial Times.
