The European Parliament has voted in favor of a controversial motion to break up Google, in order to prevent any abuse in the marketing of interlinked services by operators of search engines.

More specifically, in a vote in Strasbourg, 384 politicians voted in favor of the initiative, with 174 against and 56 abstentions.

The European Parliament called on EU member states and the European Commission to break down barriers to the growth of the EU’s digital single market. MEPs also stressed the need to prevent online companies from abusing dominant positions by enforcing EU competition rules and unbundling search engines from other commercial services.

The digital single market could generate an additional €260 billion a year for the EU economy, as well as boosting its competitiveness, says the text of the resolution.

However, it warns that important challenges, such as market fragmentation, lack of interoperability as well as regional and demographic inequalities in access to the technology, need to be tackled in order to unlock this potential.

MEPs have no power to enforce a break-up but this important vote sends a clear message to the European Commission to restrict the power of the net giant.

Common standards for cloud computing

MEPs call on the Commission “to take the lead in promoting international standards and specifications for cloud computing” so as to ensure that it is privacy friendly, reliable, accessible, highly interoperable, secure and energy efficient.