Parliamentarians in Europe have voted to break up internet monolith Google in a bid to curb its dominance.
The resolution is largely symbolic because the motion cannot be enforced, but the vote could capture the attention of regulators in Europe.
In Europe, 90 per cent of internet searches are through Google.
Breaking the company up could be a solution to complaints that it favours its own services in search results.
The motion brought before the parliament reportedly suggested separating search engines from other commercial services to ensure a level playing field for competitors in Europe.
Google's rivals lodged an anti-competitive case with the European Union's competition commissioner in 2010.
"I think you become powerful when your brand becomes a verb," said internet entrepreneur Marty Gauvin.
"You don't search for things on the internet anymore, you Google them," Mr Gauvin said.
"And so starting from search ... which Google is incredibly dominant on with something like a 91 per cent market share, Google has then branched into other areas such as the Android operating system that most people's phones use, Google Glass, the augmented reality system and a whole range of other things [like] Gmail, that they have strong positions in."
Mr Gauvin, who helped found Hostworks, a digital media company, and is now executive chairman of data centre services and consultation company Tier 5, said Google makes money through advertising relevant to the user.
"So whenever you search for anything, Google remembers that and then all of the ad places that they sell - which are most of them - will then be driven by what you've searched for, not what the site you're looking at has got anything [sic] to do with.
"People are often surprised if they're searching for their kids' weekend cricket match that suddenly they'll see an ad for a drill that they might like for Christmas and of course that's because they've searched for it."
He said Google's ability to collate user data had made it a market leader.
"Google has done an extremely good job in search, probably [as much as] the company that you would most compare them to, Microsoft, did in operating systems.
"So Windows is successful because of Microsoft's dominance but it's also successful because it's quite good.
"In the case of search, you've got a similar situation where Google's been able to continue to gather much more data than its competitors and that's helped it get better and so more people want to use it and so it becomes a bit of a positive feedback loop."
As to whether the European Parliament's vote to break up Google will be successful, Mr Gauvin said it is unlikely because Google's dominance is not here to stay.
"I can't see it being enacted and also I don't ultimately see it as being desirable for two reasons," he said. "One is that these things tend to be a bit cyclical.
"Google will not be on top forever even though it might appear that that's going to be the case today.
"In the past, people have looked at Yahoo as having too much dominance, people have looked [at] MySpace as being this huge dominant organisation, Facebook and so forth and all of these things come and go in cycles."
Topics: internet-technology, internet-culture, company-news, regulation, world-politics, european-union First posted November 28, 2014 14:56:07View the original article here
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