As far as the courts are concerned the historic auction-winning Apple-Rockstar Bidco cash bid of $4.5 billion for Nortel's 6,000 patents and patent applications can close.

In a joint video-conferenced hearing Monday the bankruptcy court in Delaware and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto that were supposed to review the controversial acquisition waved it through.

Proving himself a master of understatement one Nortel lawyer reportedly told bankruptcy court judge Kevin Gross, "I don't believe a dollar was left on the table."

According to the AP Gross called the price "quite extraordinary" and "said it would be a mistake for the court not to give its approval."

If everything runs smoothly, the deal will close in the next 30 days and the makeshift consortium consisting of Apple, Microsoft, EMC, Ericsson, RIM and Sony will pay Nortel the balance owning. They already put down a $54 million good faith deposit.

During the hearing the judges were reassured that there's no antitrust risk in the deal and that existing licensee rights are preserved.

Things, however, may not run according to plan.

The American Antitrust Institute (AAI), which wanted the courts' decision deferred, waded into the affair last week with a letter to the Justice Department. Suggesting collusion, it wants the DOJ to conduct an "in-depth investigation."

It figures the price alone "raises questions about the concerted intentions and objectives of the six consortium members that could not be achieved through independent bidding and eventual individual ownership or licensing of some or all parts of the patent portfolio at stake."

The AAI shares the widely held opinion that Google's three mobile device rivals - Apple, RIM and Microsoft - will now gang up on Google to squash Android - which is already facing 48 suits for infringement that have nothing to do with Nortel - and the AAI particularly fears "a decisively exclusionary impact on open source competition in particular."

Maybe the AAI missed the disclosure that when the bidding started resembling real money Google and Intel teamed up just like Apple went with the Rockstar brigade.

Intel had made the biggest of the "better-than-Google's-$900-million" stalking horse bid and so its was the opening bid. It reportedly hung in there until the bidding reached the $3 billion neighborhood then dropped out, seeking to partner up just like Rockstar, which also found it nosebleed territory and passed.

Everybody apparently talked to everybody else. Apple joined Rockstar after the fifth round; Intel and Google got together after the eighth. (Well, Google does have all those Intel machines in its data centers.)

The Google-Intel team went to $4.4 billion in $100 million increments and then threw in the towel giving the portfolio to Apple-Rockstar on the 19^th round.

Apple's stake evidently made the difference to Rockstar but surely Google and Intel could have dug deeper into their collective pocket if taking home the patents was so all-fired important. Goodness knows they've got the money. Maybe Google ran out of mathematical constants like pi to bid. Supposedly Google had reached its "value threshold."

Anyway, according to the Washington Post, which quoted a "source close to the matter," there is a regulatory investigation underway into the antitrust implications of Apple and Rockstar partnership even though all the companies and coalitions that took part in the auction were reviewed by the DOJ ahead of time. If the Post is right one might imagine Google did some whining to the regulators hoping the regulators might force changes like they did with the Novell patents.

Nobody knows yet what the consortium means to do with patents or how they might be split up or sold off. It's widely assumed the patents will give Microsoft more Android licenses to negotiate, purportedly giving it another multi-billion-dollar revenue stream.

By the way, Rockstar is only paying 10 cents on the dollar for the IP. Nortel spent $40 billion on R&D and acquisitions building up the stockpile.

See the first few pages of http://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Project Copperhead/English/Monitor's Reports/Seventy-FirstReportoftheMonitor.pdf.