You can now officially welcome WhatsApp to the Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) family.
The European Commission has approved Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, a popular instant messaging application for smartphones and other mobile devices. The purpose of the deal is to give the social media juggernaut an additional leg in the ever-growing mobile messaging realm race.
On Friday, the EU body issued a statement in which it noted that the deal would not antagonize anti-trust regulators in the 28-state bloc. Joaquin Almunia, EU Competition Commissioner, said that there is a wide variety of consumer communications apps in the marketplace today, such as WeChat, Google Hangouts and iMessage, and the deal would not hinder any sort of competition in the industry.
Following the United States government’s approval of the merger, the EU was the final setback for the social network to purchase WhatsApp, an app that maintains nearly half a billion monthly users, and that figure continues to climb. It charges an annual fee of 99 cents.
Privacy organizations have iterated their concerns over Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, citing the social network having the ability to coalesce the data from startups’ user data and online profiles of Facebook. In regards to privacy concerns, the Commission noted that it falls out of the purview of EU competition laws.
“In the context of this investigation, the Commission analysed potential data concentration issues only to the extent that it could hamper competition in the online advertising market,” said Almunia. “Any privacy-related concerns flowing from the increased concentration of data within the control of Facebook as a result of the transaction do not fall within the scope of EU competition law.”
Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) projects it will close the deal with WhatsApp by the end of the year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
