Microsoft gets antitrust approval to buy Skype
(Reuters) - Microsoft has won U.S. antitrust approval to buy the Internet phone service Skype, the Federal Trade Commission said in a website posting on Friday. — Microsoft announced in May it was buying Skype for $8.5 billion …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Microsoft announced the $8.5 billion Skype acquisition in May, it said the Internet phone service would become a new business division inside the company — its largest acquisition ever by a wide margin. The question since then has been regulatory: whether antitrust reviewers would wave through a deal that puts the dominant PC operating system owner in charge of the most widely used consumer calling service.
Friday's FTC website posting answers that question for the United States. It is also familiar territory for Microsoft's deal team — the agency cleared the company's $6 billion AQuantive buyout back in 2007 without conditions, and the Skype review followed the same pattern. The remaining hurdle is European, where the deal still awaits clearance.
First-order effects
- Microsoft can now close the U.S. side of the $8.5 billion purchase and begin folding Skype into the new division it created at announcement, with Skype's roughly 170 million connected users becoming a Microsoft asset.
- The FTC's unconditional-style clearance removes the main risk that had hung over the deal price since May — no divestitures or behavioral remedies were reported alongside the posting.
Second-order effects
- Rival communications platforms — Cisco's WebEx, Google Voice, Apple's FaceTime — face a competitor that can bundle Skype calling into Windows, Office and Xbox rather than sell it standalone, forcing them to defend on integration rather than features.
- European carriers and regulators take on added significance: with U.S. approval secured, attention shifts to Brussels, whose decision effectively sets the timeline for when Microsoft's integration plans can start.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern from AQuantive to Skype holds, large platform companies buying consumer-scale communications assets will continue to clear U.S. antitrust review on market-definition grounds — pushing meaningful scrutiny to Europe instead.
- The deal accelerates the convergence of operating systems and real-time communications, pointing toward voice and video being priced as bundled platform features rather than paid standalone services — a structural squeeze on pure-play VoIP vendors.
The trend: Major software platforms are absorbing consumer communications networks whole, with U.S. antitrust clearance arriving quickly while European review becomes the decisive gate.