The European Commission has approved the Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, valued at $3.1 billion.

The EU started their investigation in November 2007. The commission found that the “transaction would be unlikely to have harmful effects on consumers, either in ad serving or in intermediation in online advertising markets.”

This is excellent news for Google, and as you can see, GOOG stock has seen an increase based on the news. There is more coverage on the EU news at Techmeme. You can also find our past coverage of the Google-DoubleClick acquisition in our Google acquisitions archives.

The US Federal Trade Commission approved the purchase back in December, and EU approval was seen as the last major barrier to the purchase.

Postscript: And now Google announced (here is the blog post) that they have completed its acquisition of DoubleClick.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, “We are thrilled that our acquisition of DoubleClick has closed. With DoubleClick, Google now has the leading display ad platform, which will enable us to rapidly bring to market advances in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies, while improving the relevance of advertising for users.”

Related Topics: Google: Acquisitions | Google: Business Issues | Google: Outside US

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz