The changes take effect March 1 and remove some of the legal hurdles that Google faced by having more than 70 different privacy policies across various services.

The UK advertising standards body agreed to review the issue of child brand sponsorship following a recommendation made in a Government-commissioned report last year.

The news came on a day when thousands of Web companies, big and small, staged various online protests.

The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate are backed by the movie and music industries as a means to crack down on the sale of counterfeit goods by non-U.S. Web sites.

Google is already facing FTC scrutiny for its search practices, and in December, the Senate's top-ranking antitrust officials asked the commission to deepen its probe.

The FTC complaint alleged that two individuals and five related companies made deceptive claims in Internet ads for their Acai Pure supplement.

AirTran advertised low fares but did not make it easy enough for passengers to find out the total price, including taxes and fees.

Google announced that it is reducing the PageRank for domain www.google.com/chrome for up to and including 60 days.

“In my view, 2012 is going to be known as the year the online gambling industry in the United States is going to be born,” said Richard Bronson, chairman of US Digital Gaming, which plans to service the US online gaming industry once it gets going.