The European Commission on Friday officially approved the merger of Skype and Microsoft, concluding that combining the two companies would not significantly affect competition.
"In the area of consumer communications, the investigation found that the parties' activities mainly overlap for video communications, where Microsoft is active through its Windows Live Messenger. However, the Commission considers that there are no competition concerns in this growing market where numerous players, including Google, are present," the EU said in a statement.
"For enterprise communications, the investigation confirmed that Skype has a limited market presence for these products and does not compete directly with Microsoft's enterprise communication product Lync, which is used mostly by large enterprises," the commission concluded.
The commission found that Microsoft would not gain anything by removing Skype from competing platforms like Google's Android or Apple's iOS because that would not help "maintain and enhance the Skype brand." As for concerns that it might be tied to or bundled with Microsoft products, the EU said that "the vast majority of consumers who acquire a PC with Skype already installed are registered Skype users and ... most of them subsequently download a version different from the pre-installed one."
Microsoft announced plans to acquire Skype in May for $8.5 billion. It received approval in the U.S. from the Federal Trade Commission in June. The deal must still be approved in Russia, the Ukraine, Serbia and Taiwan, according to the New York Times.
In recent months, Skype has added video calling to a number of Android phones and released an iPad app (slideshow below), but also battled a mid-summer outage.