The European Commission has approved Microsoft’s US$8.5bn acquisition of VoIP operator Skype.
In an announcement on Friday evening, the EC said that the deal would not “significantly impede effective competition”.
The EC said after assessing…
The European Commission has approved Microsoft’s US$8.5bn acquisition of VoIP operator Skype.
In an announcement on Friday evening, the EC said that the deal would not “significantly impede effective competition”.
The EC said after assessing Microsoft’s possibility to degrade Skype’s interoperability with competing services, it concluded that the company would not have an incentive to do so.
On the issue of bundling services, the Commission said that the vast majority of consumers that buy a PC with Skype installed are registered Skype users, and also that most of them will go on to download a different version of Skype than the pre-loaded one. The EC concluded on this issue that the proposed transaction would therefore not change the current situation.
In the area of enterprise communications, the EC said that as Skype was not currently an enterprise product, its interoperability was “not decisive for competitors”.
Microsoft currently operates an enterprise communications system called Lync, but the EC said that a tie-up between Skype and Lync would not be a “must have product” for companies. It added that Lync was already facing strong competition from rivals in this area, like Cisco.
US antitrust officials at the Federal Trade Commission approved the deal in June.
