Google acquisition of Motorola approval deadline set for February 13
The world of technology seems to hold some of the worst legal practices. There's always something going wrong with patents, mergers, or complete buyouts these days.
Google and Motorola, however, are hoping they can stay away from the legal flu bug that's been going around lately. The vaccination, if there's to be one, will come from the European Commission on February 13th, which is when the commission will make the decision whether or not to let the deal go through.
Google and Motorola made the acquisition official way back in August, before a certain other acquisition fell through. Of course, Google's plans for Motorola are fairly light: Google will own Motorola's patents so there is more control over what goes into Android to keep the lawsuits down. Eric Schmidt had also stated at one point that Google may be interested in keeping a bit more control over hardware, but I wouldn't look into that very much at all. There isn't a massive change that Google could make to completely destroy its other partners.
Anyway, given those two facts, I don't see why this deal would fall through. Unlike AT&T's plans, these ones don't negatively impact customers at all; in fact, I think it'll up the game for Android handsets. Thoughts?
[ZDNet]
