The US Department of Justice in a brief said it had approved both Google's acquisition of Motorola and the joint purchase of Nortel patents by Apple, Microsoft, RIM, and others. Antitrust regulators in both cases had decided it was "unlikely" that the deals would hurt competition. It was partly reassured by Apple, Google, and Microsoft all promising to license standards-based patents based on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms.
