Postponing the merger’s intended completion by a number of weeks, a joint statement said: “The Companies expect to close their merger by the end of the year or the very early days of 2001.”
Previously the companies had insisted that the deal would be done not later than 21st December.
The US Federal Trade Commission is reviewing the merger and the review period has been extended for two weeks beyond November 30th. One concern of the FTC was that excluding AOL’s rivals from Time Warner’s cable network would be anti-competitive. The deal with EarthLink, which has 4.6 million subscribers, should ease that concern.