The Euopean Parliament has voted in favour of ‘breaking up’ Google.
MEPs (Member of European Parliament) voted 384 to 174. The Parliament itself can’t break up Google directly, but the vote will place pressure on EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager to take action.
The motion, which was raised by Andreas Schwab, a German Christian Democrat, and Ramon Tremosa, a Spanish liberal, says that Google is operating unfairly, by using its estimated 90% share of the search engine market to promote its own products and services.
Select European countries, most notably Germany, have also shown displeasure with the way Google aggregates news content, without passing on revenues to the publisher.
While it’s believed the EU won’t exactly break up Google, they may receive a hefty fine. The BBC says that the previous EU competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, suggested that the only way to solve this problem, was to fine the company $5 Billion.
Source: The Telegraph, BBC News
And who gets the 5 billion, those who have nothing or those who live in the lap of luxury?
maybe the EU has realised that the governments of Europe aren’t willing to pay the millions that the EU then pays the MEP’s (good amount of extreme right parties have MEP’s) who are voted in by the public of those countries, but these votes tend to get rather low turnout, so now the EU has moved to fine business’s to get that money
Them promoting their products don’t bother me because unlike other company’s they do that as well as work on medical projects, technology advancements and revolutionary products and services. Google has never made a bad product in my eyes and we would be no where without them.