European Union legislators in Strasbourg voted 458 to 173 in favour of the controversial initiative, with 23 abstentions. The politicians rejected a last-minute amendment that would have dropped the key clause that calls for a possible “unbundling” of search engines from other services they may offer.
However the initiative will have no binding power over the European Commission, the bloc’s top anti-trust regulator, which has spent five years conducting an investigation into Google’s search practices in Europe.
The vote “doesn’t have any legal value,” Axelle Lemaire, France’s secretary of state for digital affairs, told reporters in Brussels. It “simply expresses the wish of the newly elected European parliamentarians and does this in a strong manner.”
But its proponents still hope to put pressure on the regulator to move swiftly against Google.
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