Parliamentarians have called for European commission to consider unbundling Google’s search from other services as part of antitrust regulation

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The European parliament has approved a motion calling for tougher regulation of internet search, including suggesting breaking up Google as a solution to its dominance in Europe.



The motion passed as expected by 384 votes to 174 with 56 MEPs abstaining, and encourages the European commission (EC) to consider unbundling Google’s search business from its advertising and other businesses.

The parliament has no direct power to break up Google in this manner and its calls to the EC have been seen as politicalisation of a regulatory issue.

The resolution calls the EC “to prevent any abuse in the marketing of interlinked services by operators of search engines” and “to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services” in the long run.

Google declined to comment.

Climb down

Since the reports of the motion leaked last week, its authors have attempted to downplay the suggestion of a breakup or an unbundling of Google, claiming that it is just one of several options being put forward.

The German conservative Andreas Schwab and Spanish liberal Ramon Tremosa, two of the authors of the motion, said they were “not ideological against Google. We are against monopolies. Unbundling is one of the ideas, but we proposed several.”

Google holds 90% of the search market in Europe and as such has been the subject of a long-running antitrust investigation with the EC, which was recently re-opened after the commission rejected the settlement proposal.

But Günther Oettinger, the commissioner in charge of the digital economy, directly opposed the unbundling suggestion in the parliament’s motion. He told the German business journalist Roland Tichy that “breaking and expropriation” was not an option and that such measures would be “instruments of the planned economy, not the market economy”.

Google is subject to the “right to be forgotten” ruling, which is currently seeing the pan-European data protection watchdogs call for search results to be deleted from google.com, as well as local EU domains.

The resolution also called for member states to “put an end to roaming charges inside the EU, provide more legal certainty as regards net neutrality and improve consumer protection”.

• Does Europe have the power to break up Google?