Europe continues to show its opposition to Google's business activities, with the European Parliament passing a nonbinding vote Thursday to break up the tech-giant's businesses.
The resolution had 384 votes in favor and 174 opposed, and asks the European Commission "to consider proposals aimed at unbundling search engines from other commercial services," according to CNET. The idea is to separate Google's search businesses from its other services, which include flight search, hotel reservations and shopping comparison.
However, the vote doesn't mean anything will actually change for the search giant, as Thomas Vinje, a lawyer with Clifford Chance who represents the consortium FairSearch, points out.
"The whole thing is a bit blown out of proportion," Vinje said. "The resolution doesn't call for a breakup, and voting up and down doesn't actually vote for or against that proposition."
FairSearch is made up of Google search competitors and includes travel book sites like TripAdvisor, Expedia and Hotwire, and shopping sites like TheFind and Foundem.
The Parliament's lack of formal authority over antitrust policy in the 28 countries of the European Union plays a role in the vote not having a legitimate effect, The New York Times reported.
The main issues involved in the resolution include Google's dominance in Europe's Internet search business and European fears of American technology giants and their spying capabilities, which have grown over the last 18 months due to whistleblower Edward J. Snowden's revelations of such activities. European citizens' increasing reliance on gadgets doesn't make this situation any easier.
Two parliament members, Andreas Schwab from Germany and Ramon Tremosa i Balcells from Spain, brought the motion for the vote on Thursday, CNET reported.
"Indexation, evaluation, and presentation ranking by search engines must be unbiased and transparent," the resolution said. "For interlinked services, search engines must guarantee full transparency when showing search results," for which the resolution "calls on the commission to prevent any abuse in the marketing of interlinked services by search engine operators."
Additional requests of the resolution include a new copyright reform from the commission intended "to allow an integrated and secure online and mobile payments market," and promote standards that will "enable privacy-friendly, reliable, highly interoperable, secure and energy-efficient cloud services."
Europe has been investigating Google's Internet dominance since 2010, and European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager is currently in charge of the case.
