EU lawmakers ponder 'unbundling' of Google
By Benjamin Fox
EU lawmakers are considering whether to prevent Google and fellow search engines from being involved in other commercial activities on the Internet.
The move would undermine the US firm’s dominance in the sector, with MEPs to debate and vote on the ideas in Strasbourg later this week.
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But the EU’s new digital agenda commissioner, Anders Ansip, weighed into the debate in an interview with Reuters on Monday (24 November).
"We have some doubts about misuse of gatekeeper positions and also leading positions in the markets,” he said.
The EU doesn’t have the power to break up companies as such.
But it could require different services to be "unbundled" in a model it already applies to energy providers.
"I'm not ready to say that they [search engine firms] will have to be broken up," noted Ansip, adding that the commission would "have to investigate very carefully where those problems are ... and then find possible solutions".
The commission has been conducting an anti-trust investigation into Google for more than four years.
The probe follows claims by its competitors that Google is using its 95 percent market share in Europe to distort search results by ensuring that links to its own products and services come top.
The investigation has also looked at how Google displays content from other websites without their permission.
For its part, Google has made three "offers of remedies" to the EU executive.
But none of them passed muster with the former competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, who came under pressure from the French and German governments, as well as commercial giants Axel Springer, Rupert Murdoch, and Microsoft, not to back down.
The case has now been taken over by Almunia's replacement, the Danish compteition commissioner Margrethe Vestager.
Ansip's unbundling scenario aside, the commission can also fine Google up to 10 percent of its €40 billion annual turnover if no agreement is found.
On Wednesday, MEPs and commission officials will debate a cross-party resolution authored by the parliament’s biggest political groups examining ways to tackle Internet dominance.
The vote is scheduled for the next day.
The campaign is being spearheaded by German centre-right deputy Andreas Schwab and Ramon Tremosa, a Spanish liberal.
In a statement on Monday, the two MEPs insisted that their criticism of Google is “not ideological”.
"We are against monopolies," they said in a joint statement.
"Unbundling is one of the ideas, but we proposed several ideas for solutions that are on the table".