"The European parliament is poised to call for a break-up of Google" in a vote next week, the Financial Times reported today. The resolution would be nonbinding, because any final action would have to be taken by the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union.

"A draft motion seen by the Financial Times says that 'unbundling [of] search engines from other commercial services' should be considered as a potential solution to Google’s dominance," the paper wrote. "It has the backing of the parliament’s two main political blocs, the European People’s Party and the Socialists."

While the parliament itself "has no formal power to split up companies," it does have "increasing influence on the [European] Commission, which initiates all EU legislation," the report said. "The commission has been investigating concerns over Google’s dominance of online search for five years, with critics arguing that the company’s rankings favor its own services, hitting its rivals’ profits."

Text of the draft resolution is expected to be finalized early next week with a vote coming on Thursday, the Times wrote, adding that European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager has said she will listen to Google and its various critics before deciding how to go forward with an antitrust inquiry.

Google declined to comment when contacted by Ars. Google also declined to comment to the Financial Times.

"However, executives at the company are understood to be furious at the political nature of the motion and only became aware of the document in the past couple of days, after an MEP [Member of the European Parliament] contacted Google for advice on its meaning," the newspaper wrote.

European regulators have taken a hard line against Google on several issues, including privacy, self-promoting behavior in its search engine, and the "right to be forgotten."

UPDATE: Ars has now seen a copy of the draft proposal. While it does not mention Google directly, it says that "the online search market is of particular importance in ensuring competitive conditions within the digital single market, given the potential development of search engines into gatekeepers and their possibility of commercialising secondary exploitation of obtained information." The proposal "therefore calls on the Commission to enforce EU competition rules decisively, based on input from all relevant stakeholders and taking into account the entire structure of the Digital Single Market in order to ensure remedies that truly benefit consumers, internet users and online businesses; [and] furthermore calls on the Commission to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services as one potential long-term solution to achieve the previously mentioned aims."

European MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht issued a statement saying, “It is key to assure equal competition in a Digital Single Market. Search engines like Google should not be allowed to use their market power to push forward other commercial activities of the same company.”