It turns out the Europe’s “right to be forgotten” regulations against Google were only the beginning. The Financial Times reports that the European Union’s parliament is working on a proposal to force Google to unbundle its major search business from all its other services. In other words, it sounds like Google will have to keep data on what you search for separate from all of the other services it offers, such as Gmail, Google Maps and more. It also sounds like Google would be prohibited from giving favorable treatment in its search results to its own services.
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“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 publication writes. “The European parliament has no formal power to split up companies, but has increasing influence on the commission, which initiates all EU legislation. 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.”
Google wouldn’t comment on The Financial Times’ report but we can’t imagine that the company is all that happy about it, since it sounds like the European parliament is all but calling for a breakup of the company. Forcing Google to unbundle its search business from its other services would definitely put a healthy dent in the company’s profitability, so we can expect to see Google fight this with everything it’s got.
