March 2011

In 1991, the Spanish newspaper El País published an article centered on a dispute between Madrid plastic surgeon Hugo Guidotti Russo and one of his patients over an allegedly botched breast surgery. The headline: "The Risk of Wanting to Be Slim." Nearly 20 years later, Dr. Guidotti Russo, backed by Spain's privacy regulator, contends that the tale of the dispute is personal information and wants to purge the article from Google, where it shows up on the first page of results when his name is searched. His complaint accounts for one of about 80 instances in which the Spanish regulator has told U.S.-based Google Inc. to remove personal information about individuals from its search results. Google says it plans to challenge most of those orders, arguing that the agency is overstepping its authority.

Americans aren't getting enough sleep, and technology may be the culprit. In the National Sleep Foundation's 2011 Sleep in America poll, out today, 95% of the 1,508 people surveyed reported using some type of electronic device — such as a TV, computer, video game or cellphone — within an hour of bedtime at least a few nights a week. All these devices can affect the quality of sleep, says Lauren Hale, associate professor of preventive medicine at Stony Brook (NY) University School of Medicine, one of the researchers involved in the study. "Communication technologies are often light-emitting, which can suppress the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin and make it harder to go to sleep at night." Both the light and alert sounds from such devices can interfere with falling asleep and staying asleep, she says.

The reformulation of sugary, fatty and high-sodium foods aimed at kids that began in 2007 was supposed to be a wake-up call to the kids media marketplace. The changes to the products, resulting from years of watchdog-group scrutiny and Federal Communications Commission recommendations, sent shockwaves through the sales departments of Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Disney as they scrambled to work with their partners to find new ways to market their products. Four years later, a lot of that ad money has come back -- even as sales of some affected products have slowed.

The kids' upfront finished as much as 5% up last year, compared to 2009, at just under $1 billion, on the strength of strong spending among toys, movie studios and renewed spending from packaged-food and quick-service restaurant advertisers. This year's kids upfront is expected to increase another 3% to 5% based on early estimates from multiple executives. Driving that resurgence is a new focus on targeting parents vs. kids, and a commitment to marketing healthful products. As part of the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, issued by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, 17 advertisers, from Burger King to Kraft to Mars, have pledged to improve the health content of their products and change their marketing strategies. Elaine Kolish, VP-director of the CFBAI, said advertisers were in 2007 required to promote healthy products in at least 50% of their media targeted to kids, but all the participating marketers ended up promoting those products in all their kids' ad time. In January 2010 that became an official requirement. Additionally, Coca-Cola, Cadbury, Mars and Hershey's have all committed to not advertising at all to children under 12.

The high-profile Internet blackout that briefly enveloped Egypt has served only to illuminate the challenges Congress faces in promoting Internet freedom worldwide.

Lawmakers have invested in technologies aimed at circumventing online censorship by governments bent on silencing dissent. Certainly, that has wide support. But many tech stakeholders feel Congress risks being distracted from the bigger Internet policy picture, one that has implications for human rights, cybersecurity and commerce. “Internet freedom is an issue that has rightly captured the support of a large [number] of people on Capitol Hill,” said Richard Fontaine, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, of Congress and the State Department’s work. “They put money behind their wishes, which is a rare thing sometimes, but it is like anything else: The hard part is when you get to implement this ... and how you navigate the tensions.” Middle East leaders are also confronting new Internet challenges, albeit with polar-opposite goals. That was on display in January, when state authorities shuttered the Internet for days and initially detained Google marketer Wael Ghonim, who launched the now-famous Facebook page that helped catalyze protests and force President Hosni Mubarak to step down.