Good news for the folks at Apple today. Last night, anti-trust regulators confirmed that Apple, as rumored, has been given clearance to enter the billion dollar bidding war for the valuable patents belonging to bankrupt Nortel.
Late last Friday, sources informed the Wall Street Journal that Apple will likely join Intel and Ericsson in a bidding dogfight with Google to acquire highly sought after patents from the telecom-equipment maker.
We can now confirm that Apple is, indeed, a “qualified bidder.”
The auction is scheduled to take place Monday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Nortel’s trove contains some 6,000 patents spanning key portions of the modern world, including Wi-Fi, Internet search and a next-generation mobile-data technology now being adopted by carriers, known as LTE.
Nortel’s treasure chest of patents is believed to be worth an estimated $1 billion. Many analysts believe this bidding war will come down to an ugly battle between Apple and Google, as both tech giants look to shore up their posturing in the mobile technology space.
“There has been one round of bidding on those patents, this has been completed,” one source told Reuters last December. “And what Nortel has done is divide the patents up into different lots covering different kinds of technologies.”
