Google's Motorola Purchase has been approved

In the span of hours, both the European Union and the US Justice Department have given Google the green light to complete its takeover of Motorola Mobility. So as of this moment, the entire thing is officially official. Whether the move will prove to be wise in the long run, however, still remains to be seen.

Google is buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. While the general consensus is that Google made this deal for the patents, there have been some (mostly legitimate) fears about the merger damping the competitive market. But even Google’s hardware partners, competitors to Motorola Mobility, have lauded the purchase as a good step forward.

Microsoft and Apple have been trying their darndest to eat Google’s Android operating system like the deserts they name the versions after. Microsoft has successfully managed to get bribes (also known as licensing fees) from most Android device manufacturers, mostly using incredibly broad, insanely unspecific patents as leverage. Apple has done much the same, since the company launched Steve Jobs’ “thermonuclear war” on the platform. Apple is amazingly aggressive with patents, and has the tendency to snap up as many patents as it possibly can that it thinks a competitor might want to use in their product. Apple never uses these ideas, only keeps them to keep others from innovating.

Google, for its part, hasn’t been as avid a collector of software patents. This has come back to bite them, as the modern multinational game of war more resembles mutually assured destruction than it does a classic conflict. Google has nothing to threaten others with. Well, that was true, before the Motorola merger got approved.

For its part, the US Justice Department has warned that they "will not hesitate to take appropriate enforcement action to stop any anticompetitive use of SEP (standard essential patent) rights." Which makes sense, given the mess that most of the software giants have gotten themselves in. Hopefully that doesn’t preclude using the patents as a defense, though.

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