Why does Europe want to break up Google? Over the course of several (ongoing) antitrust lawsuits against Google in Europe, the European Parliament has realised that the online giant tends to manipulate search results. A lot. So it recently voted to break up the company.

When will this happen? No one’s breaking up Google just yet. To be exact, the Parliament has approved a draft motion – through a legally irrelevant vote –asking the European Commission to consider dismantling Google as one of the options to reducing the search giant’s clout online. The technical term is “unbundling” Google’s search section from the company’s other commercial services, like YouTube or Gmail.

How will they do it? Well, no one really knows. In fact, the members of the European Parliament who suggested the unbundling themselves do not know how to go about it. Most commentators seem to believe that this is highly unlikely. In fact, the union’s competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia, who began the antitrust investigations against Google, has said the EU currently does not have the laws required to break up companies.

Why are they hounding Google then? Europe’s fears about the growing dominance of American digital technology took centre stage after Edward Snowden revealed that even the German Chancellor could be an easy victim to spying from across the Atlantic.

The Prism spying programme had direct access to Google, Facebook and Apple servers. So Google, which is said to control over 90 per cent of Europe’s online search market, is already on Europe’s bad books. Besides this, the draft resolution also says that it wants to break down barriers in digital commerce and even the online arena for local businesses.

So European companies are leading this charge? Actually, at the forefront of the campaign against Google are American tech firms Microsoft and ratings aggregator Yelp. There’s also the Open Internet Project, which claims to speaks for hundreds of European internet companies when it says Google has too much sway online. Two of the Project’s key complaints are that Google uses its customer data to strengthen its own online position and that it makes “unannounced and unjustified” changes to its search algorithms which “promotes its own services and content and downgrades those of competitors, which may be more relevant to consumer’s queries.” Google’s search box, the project’s site says, is a threat to the digital economy.

What happens if Google is broken up? Europe’s concerns have mainly to do with what it calls American companies’ disregard for data gathering and privacy. (The European Commission told Google in September that its citizens have the ‘right to be forgotten’ online.) However, with the latest move, some people are worried internet users will be the ones losing out if the data that Google gathers about them from their search patterns are excluded from their online adventures elsewhere at Google Inc. Besides, if making Google ‘unbiased’ reduces its ad revenue, will it mean the end of free online services?

So Google’s safe for now?

The EU Parliament’s call to break up Google is being interpreted as ineffectual legally but a politically powerful stance, as a warning sign to the behemoth that the whip’s going to be cracked if it continues to be evil.

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