European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

But landmark vote unlikely to make any impact

Google should be broken up in order to put a halt to the web giant's dominance in the marketplace, the European Parliament has ruled

The decision was made in a vote by European MPs on a proposal to break the search giant up in order to prevent Google from favouring its own services in search queries. It marks the latest development in an ongoing antitrust disagreement between Google and the European authorities, with the latter of the opinion that Google has too much power.

While the European politicians don't have the power to break up Google, the vote sends a message that they believe that the company has too much power.

However, both US politicians and trade bodies have criticised the European Parliament vote on breaking up Google, claiming that Europe is unfairly targeting American technology companies and that the EU isn't committed to open markets.

"This and similar proposals build walls rather than bridges [and] do not appear to give full consideration to the negative effect such policies may have on the broader US-EU trade relationship," wrote senators Ron Wyden and Orrin Hatch and congressmen Dave Camo and Sander Levin, in an open letter criticising the European Union's targeting of Google.

The Google breakup vote represents the first of its kind in the European Parliament and was jointly proposed by German MEP Andreas Schwab and Spanish MEP Ramon Tremos. The proposal comes after what they deemed to be unsatisfactory handling of the antitrust case, deemed by many to be too lenient on Google.

"In case the proceedings against Google carry on without any satisfying decisions and the current anti-competitive behaviour continues to exist, a regulation of the dominant online web search should be envisaged," the two parliamentarians said in a statement.

The ultimate decision on what to do with Google will rest with EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager. Her predecessor Joaquin Almunia repeatedly tried to get to the bottom of the antitrust deal, but the European Commission couldn't come to a satisfactory conclusion.