EU lawmakers vote to break up search engines

Google's regulatory woes in Europe increased as lawmakers in the EU yesterday voted overwhelmingly for the regional group to consider breaking up search engines to bolster competition, Bloomberg reported.

A resolution to consider ''unbundling search engines from other commercial services'' received the backing of 384 lawmakers in the European Parliament as against 174 opposing it.

Google is under EC investigation for possible anti-trust violations. The motion, which is not binding, however, did not mention Google by name.

''European enterprises are losing revenues and people are getting fired,'' said Ramon Tremosa, a member of the EU Parliament from Spain's Catalonia region. ''European consumers are not having the most pertinent choice because of Google's preferential treatment to its own services.''

Google, with a market share of over 90 per cent for internet search in some European countries, faced an assault on its business from across the bloc.

The company came in for criticism from privacy regulators this week, with German politicians  urging the EU to push on with the anti-trust probe. Google faces a possible levy on internet copyright, adding to a Spanish law that allows publishers to charge for web content.

Meanwhile, Marty Gauvin, one of Australia's most experienced net entrepreneurs told  Simon Santow of www.abc.net.au that on the internet, the kind of jargon was that one wanted to control eyeballs.

He said businesses actually wanted to drag eyeballs into doing different things and Google made its money through advertising that was placed based on search.

So whenever one searched for anything, Google remembered that and then all the ad places that it sold, would be driven by what people searched for.

He said tGoogle's power is probably more than people thought. It was not just when one typed in Google.com, it was when one actually saw an ad that was being driven by what Google had captured from people's searches.