Microsoft's $6 billion acquisition of online advertising group aQuantive has cleared an antitrust regulatory hurdle, an Associated Press report said.
The Associated Press report said the Federal Trade Commission mandates a waiting period to review anticompetitive fallout from large mergers.
In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, aQuantive said the waiting period passed without requests for further information from the FTC, the report said.
A shareholder meeting to vote on the sale of the company is scheduled for August 9.
An executive said aQuantive is still working out how the organization, which employs 2,560 people worldwide, with 662 in Seattle, will look after the buyout, the report said.
Microsoft's Live search engine lags far behind sites operated by Google and Yahoo, in the number of searches performed each month. As a result, the company racks up far fewer dollars from the small text ads placed next to search results.
Microsoft's acquisition of aQuantive, announced in May, followed Google's announcement that it would pay $3.1 billion for online ad technology company DoubleClick, the report said.