WASHINGTON - Google, the world's Web search leader, said Thursday it was unlikely U.S. antitrust authorities would seek to impose conditions on its $3.1 billion acquisition of advertising company DoubleClick.

David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, told reporters he did not expect the Federal Trade Commission to require conditions regarding either antitrust or privacy concerns, which were raised earlier in the day during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing.

"We don't believe that's likely to happen," Drummond said in response to a reporter's question about whether Google would agree to any government-imposed conditions on the deal.

Critics say Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, an advertising tools supplier, may give the company too much power over online advertising. Google stores mounds of data on the Internet-surfing habits of users and uses the information to make money by selling advertisements.

DoubleClick connects ad agencies, marketers and Web Site publishers and has more than 1,500 corporate clients.

At the hearing, Drummond rejected the idea the deal would be anti-competitive and he promised lawmakers that Google was taking more steps to protect Internet users' privacy.

Google was looking at the Internet display advertising business with a "fresh eye and evaluating whether changes can be made to innovate on user privacy in this space," he said.

Among the privacy protection technology Google is examining is what Drummond called a "crumbled cookie," in which information about an Internet user would not be connected to a single piece of identifying code, known as a cookie.

Google is also exploring better ways of providing notice within ads to identify who was responsible for them, he said.

"We have consulted with numerous privacy, consumer and industry groups in developing these ideas and have endeavored to be responsive to their concerns," he said.

Only a handful of senators appeared at the hearing. They asked questions about whether the deal would be anti- competitive but said little to indicate whether they supported or opposed it.

But the deal drew sharp criticism at the hearing from rival Microsoft.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, likened the deal to a merger of the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ and said it would make Google "the overwhelmingly dominant pipeline for all forms of online advertising."

"It will be bad for publishers, bad for advertisers and, most importantly, bad for consumers," Smith said in written testimony. "I think it's very disconcerting to think about a future in which all the data is flowing through one pipeline."

Microsoft recently bought DoubleClick competitor aQuantive for $6 billion, one of the largest deals in a recent wave of consolidation within the Internet advertising sector.

Nor was everyone reassured about the privacy steps Google is taking.

Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told senators that, as a condition of approving the deal, the FTC should set privacy standards and strict limits on how long Google could retain users' data.

Drummond said Google would continue to respond to feedback from privacy groups to work out those kinds of concerns.

However, he said the criticism raised by Microsoft was misplaced because Google and DoubleClick were in different lines of the advertising business and do not directly compete with each other.

In addition to winning approval for the deal from U.S. antitrust regulators, Google is also awaiting a decision from competition regulators in the European Union and Australia.

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