A mere few days before the European Commission's February 13th deadline for deciding on the legality of Google's takeover of Motorola, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the US Justice Department has made up its mind and will approve the merger. The time since Google announced its intention to acquire Motorola for somewhere around $12 billion has been filled with antitrust regulators on both sides of the Atlantic sweating the details of how Google will wield the powers contained in Motorola's rich patent portfolio. This prompted the Mountain View company to send out letters to a number of standards organizations this week, to reassure them that it'll maintain Motorola's commitment to licensing patents considered essential to industry standards under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Whether that was enough to sway the Justice Department is unknown, but at least one of the big hurdles for Google's acquisition of Motorola seems to have been overcome.