After a lengthy and secretive bidding process, the FCC has announced that Verizon Wireless and AT&T are the big winners of the 700 MHz wireless spectrum auction.

The auction drew a lot of attention from the interactive community when Google announced that it would put in a minimum bid of $4.6 billion. Officials at Google said the company may have lost the auction, but the results will prove to be a victory for American consumers. 

"One thing is clear: although Google didn't pick up any spectrum licenses, the auction produced a major victory for American consumers," Google officials wrote on the company blog. "We congratulate the winners and look forward to a more open wireless world."

According to TechCrunch, Google's statement may be more than just spin.

"The real winner here is Google precisely because it lost," Erick Schonfeld wrote. "Google committed to bidding the minimum $4.6 billion that would trigger open device and open application rules that it had lobbied for, but nobody seriously thought it actually wanted to win the auction."

While Schonfeld's analysis may reflect a little 20/20 hindsight -- many Google-watchers suspected the company was interested in winning the auction -- the result is a good one for Google, which will attempt to leverage a more open mobile space. 

Google, like Microsoft and Yahoo, has placed a great deal of emphasis on the emerging mobile space as a new frontier for digital advertising. Recently, Google said it had hit a "watershed moment" with mobile, with the platform growing at a faster than expected pace.

The auction, which lasted 260 rounds and was spread over the course of seven weeks, ended earlier this week, but the FCC waited several days to release the results.