Google’s Slap on the Wrist, New Meta Whistleblowers Make Waves

This week in The Dispatch we’re covering the new confounding Google antitrust remedy ruling, new Meta whistleblowers, and Big Tech corruption in the White House.

The Tech Oversight Project

09 Sep 2025 — 7 min read

Welcome back to The Dispatch from The Tech Oversight Project, your weekly updates on all things tech accountability. Follow us on Twitter at @Tech_Oversight and @techoversight.bsky.social on Bluesky.

🗓️ WHAT WE’RE WATCHING: At 2:30 PM today, whistleblowers will testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law — alleging Meta deleted, doctored, and blocked internal safety research showing kids were being exposed to child grooming, sexual harassment, and violence across the company’s VR, Dating, and Marketplace platforms. Tune in here.

⚖️ GOOGLE: GUILTY, PLEASE PROCEED: Judge Amit Mehta’s long-awaited decision in the Google Search antitrust trial landed this week, and it’s a historic missed opportunity. He ruled that Google unlawfully monopolizes search — and then refused to remedy the very monopoly he found illegal. Instead, Mehta handed Google a set of cosmetic rules that preserve the very dominance he declared unlawful. If the DOJ doesn’t appeal, this ruling becomes a playbook for impunity.

What Judge Mehta Found:

No divestiture. The judge refused to break Google up — it keeps Chrome and Android.
Google can’t cut exclusive “default search” deals anymore (with iPhones, browsers, etc.), but can confusingly still cut similar predatory default agreements.
Google has to share some search data with rivals, but only once and in a limited way.
Google must let competitors license its search results, but only for the short term and at a price.
No forced “choice screen” requiring users to pick a search engine when setting up devices.

The contradictions pile up: Mehta finds Google holds monopoly power, then rejects any meaningful structural fix. He acknowledges Google skewed the market through exclusivity deals, then refuses to impose changes that would actually restore competition. The result is a blueprint for how a trillion-dollar company can break the law and come away stronger.

The DOJ can’t let this incoherent ruling stand. Google has now been ruled a monopoly three times, with zero real consequences. Senator Amy Klobuchar said the ruling is “a reminder of Google’s sweeping power over the online economy, but the limited remedies ordered by the court demonstrate why we need additional rules of the road for Big Tech.”

The bigger lesson is the courts won’t save us. Congress has a bipartisan bill — the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) — ready to go. Passing it would do what the courts won’t. If lawmakers fail to act, Big Tech will keep writing the rules of the internet — and the courts will keep rubber-stamping it.

💨 META WHISTLEBLOWERS EXPOSE NEW PREDATORY PRACTICES AND PRIVACY VIOLATIONS: A new investigation by the Washington Post details how Meta deleted and buried evidence that showed kids were unsafe in its “Metaverse.” After Frances Haugen and the Facebook Files in 2021, lawyers were told to use attorney-client privilege to conceal sensitive research, and researchers to avoid using terms like “illegal” and “violates the law”. When a teen disclosed his little brother, who was younger than 10, had been sexually propositioned by adults numerous times, managers ordered the documentation of the claim deleted. The company’s own internal slides said: “we know there are U10s on the platform.”

When the FTC opened an investigation under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), Meta scrambled to roll out “Project Salsa” — tween accounts and parental controls — not as a safeguard but as legal cover. The pattern is clear: damage control first, kids’ safety second.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE: Another whistleblower story! The New York Times reports WhatsApp’s former head of security is suing Meta for ignoring massive vulnerabilities that put billions of users at risk. He says he was fired for raising alarms.

What does it say about Meta that so many insiders keep blowing the whistle on its cover-ups and harmful, predatory practices?

📜 CRUNCH TIME IN SACRAMENTO: As the Assembly and Senate head into their final voting week, key tech accountability bills are moving toward decisive floor votes. Big Tech lobbyists are pouring millions into Sacramento to weaken or derail reforms, but the next two weeks will determine whether lawmakers side with the public or industry.

See the bills Tech Oversight CA supports that are still in play.

What to watch:

Floor votes Monday–Friday. Which survive intact, which get gutted, which get made 2-year bills.
Last-minute amendments. Industry is pressing for carve-outs and delays.
Signal votes. These will show who in Sacramento is willing to cross Big Tech.

One bill we’re watching especially closely:

AB 1064 – the LEAD for Kids Act, first-in-the-nation legislation to address the rapid rise of AI companions and the serious risks they pose to kids and families. The bill is scheduled for a vote in the CA Senate this week.

“By establishing guardrails that protect children and families from the devastating harms of AI companion chatbots, AB 1064 would lead the nation in responding to Big Tech’s newest threat to young people’s mental health and wellbeing. Parents across the country share a fundamental anger that Big Tech companies willingly and knowingly risk the lives of our kids, an anger that grows every time we hear about the loss of a young person like Adam Raine. As former tech employees continue to blow the whistle that these companies have repeatedly buried evidence that their products cause harm, California lawmakers must act now.”

– Sacha Haworth, Executive Director, Tech Oversight California

🤖 MOVE FAST AND GROOM THINGS: What do Timothée Chalamet, Chappell Roan, and Patrick Mahomes have in common? Their personalities were hijacked and turned into Character.AI chatbots with synthetic voices — then used by teens almost a million times. Researchers found the chatbots raised inappropriate content every five minutes on average. Sometimes kids tested the limits; other times the bots made sexual advances out of nowhere — because nothing says “safety” like an AI Timothée Chalamet hitting on a child.

Character.AI claims to ban grooming, self-harm content, and impersonations, but when you design for dopamine, you don’t get safety — you get bots that are sycophantic and manipulate kids into harmful para-social traps. Big Tech calls it innovation. It’s really just exploitation.

🌹CORRUPTION IN THE WHITE HOUSE: Trump invited the country’s worst Big Tech bros over for dinner to show off his newly paved, umbrella-ridden Rose Garden — too bad it rained and was moved inside. The guest list included every CEO from Big Tech companies you’d expect:

Meta, under investigation because its chatbots are sexting kids.
OpenAI, which is being sued for wrongful death, after ChatGPT helped a teenager take his own life.
Google, there to celebrate dodging punishment, even after being declared an illegal monopoly for the third time.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, so desperate to dodge an antitrust trial, managed to thank Trump eight times in two minutes when the floor passed to him.

Earlier that same day, the FTC announced investigations into these very companies for the harms their chatbots are inflicting on kids.

“This is corruption in the Rose Garden.”

— Sacha Haworth, Executive Director, The Tech Oversight Project

This wasn’t a policy summit. There was no “innovating.” It was just a room full of billionaires drowning in lawsuits and investigations, groveling for protection in a White House as corrupt as they are.