EU Parliament votes to break up Google

The European Parliament has passed a nonbinding vote to break up Google, The New York Times reports.

The resolution, passed overnight, is merely symbolic and comes shortly after a separate European body sought to expand “right to be forgotten” privacy protections.

A break up of Google in Europe will almost certainly not happen, legal experts say.

The tech giant is embroiled in a long-running antitrust case with the European Commission over the way it uses its search dominance, which accounts for more than 90% of the European market, to push its own services.

The resolution said “the online search market is of particular importance in ensuring competitive conditions within the digital single market” and welcomed the European Commission’s pledges to investigate the search engine’s practices further.

It called on the commission “to prevent any abuse in the marketing of interlinked services by operators of search engines”, stressing the importance of non-discriminatory online search.

“Indexation, evaluation, presentation and ranking by search engines must be unbiased and transparent,” members of European Parliament (MEP) say.

Given the role search engines play in “commercialising secondary exploitation of obtained information” and the need to enforce EU competition rules, MEPs called on the Commission “to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services”.

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