The European Commission has announced it has reopened its investigation into the Sony BMG merger, three months after it announced the investigation was on hold.
As you all know, obviously, because we've reported on it 7.3 million times, EC competition officials are currently investigating whether the merger of Sony Corp and Bertelsmann's recorded music companies back in 2004 should ever have been given the green light after the European courts ruled last year that officials did not cover all bases in their original investigation into the impact of further consolidation in the recorded music sector.
Officials undertaking the new review of the merger announced earlier this year that they would be staging an in-depth investigation and as a result requested unprecedented amounts of information from Sony and BMG. The investigation was subsequently put on hold when the major record companies said they'd need more time to get together the requested information.
The decision to resume the investigation presumably means all the required information has now been provided. The three month delay means that officials, who had originally been expected to make a ruling on the merger next week, won't now make a decision until October.