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Alphabet Inc.’s Google at last gained approval from the European Commission to acquire Fitbit Inc., after satisfying concerns about how the advertising giant would make use of health data obtained through the deal.
The European Commission announced Thursday that it had cleared the $2.1 billion acquisition after it conducted an “in-depth investigation” into the combination and secured commitments from Google pertaining to data use. Google agreed that it wouldn’t use the health data it got through the deal for advertising and that the company would “silo” away Fitbit FIT, +0.28% user data in a separate place from other data that gets used for ad purposes.
The Commission also dismissed the notion that the Google-Fitbit deal would be anticompetitive, citing the “nascent” digital health-care sector in Europe, with “many players active in this space,” was well as Fitbit’s “limited user community” in the European smartwatch segment.
As for concerns about how users could track the ways their data was being used, the Commission said that Google would have to company with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation privacy laws but that other “regulatory tools” were better suited than the merger-approval process to address these issues.
Read: Big Tech has an antitrust target on its back. Here’s why that should concern investors
“We believe this deal will spur innovation in wearable devices and enable us to build products that help people lead healthier lives,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We understand that regulators wanted to look closely at this transaction, and we have worked constructively with them to resolve their concerns, including the set of legally binding commitments the European Commission accepted today.”
The approval comes despite growing antitrust scrutiny of Alphabet. The Justice Department in the U.S. sued Alphabet GOOG, -0.57% GOOGL, -0.68% in October, charging that its search-engine deal with Apple AAPL, +0.55% and its mandatory inclusion of Google Apps on devices running its Android operating system are anticompetitive. A suit filed by the attorney general of Texas argued that the company was abusing its monopoly in search advertising. Texas was joined by nine other states in its lawsuit, and a group of states led by Colorado and Nebraska are expected to file their own shortly.
See more: Google hit with second U.S. antitrust suit, and a third is expected soon
Fitbit had previously expected the deal with Google to close this year but disclosed in August that the transaction time frame “may extend beyond” 2020.
Fitbit shares were up 0.3% in Thursday trading, while Alphabet shares were off 0.7%.
