The Associated Press today reports that Microsoft lost its appeal in the antitrust case before the European Union, and the EU Court of First Instance has ruled that Microsoft must share its communication code with competitors, sell a copy of Windows without Windows Media Player, and pay a $690 million fine, the largest ever levied by the court. In Europe, the move was hailed as an important protection for consumers and for stimulating competition, helping level the playing field for European software firms. BBC News also reports on the story.

Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, will today deliver Google’s endorsement of a global privacy standard, at a meeting of UNESCO in Strasbourg, France, reports the IDGNS news service.

“Google envisions the policy to be a product of self-regulation by companies, improved laws, and possible new ones, according to a Google spokesman based in London.“

UPDATE: Peter Fleischer has now posted the Google position on global privacy standards on the Google Policy blog.

Wired magazine has published an interactive map that shows the price in dollars for 100 kilobytes per second of broadband Internat access around the world. The accompanying text notes:

Only about 3 percent of the world’s population has broadband, and prices vary wildly. In Japan, DSL or cable averages 6 cents per 100 Kbps, with users typically paying 0.002 percent of their monthly salary for high-speed access. But in Kenya, that same hookup speed costs $86.11 — nearly twice the average monthly income.

It is clear from this map and other sources of statistics about broadband access that high-speed Internet is most expensive in the world’s poorest countries.

UN Dispatch, a United Nations publication online, features an article titled “How PDAs are Saving Lives in Africa,“ by Joel Selanikio, MD, co-founder of DataDyne.org. Dr. Selanikio writes:

Zambia is replacing paper-based health surveys with those used on PDAs (personal digital assistants). This means no data entry, no cumbersome clipboards, and most importantly no waiting weeks or months for data entry clerks to enter stacks of paper into a computer for analysis.

Zambia today is helping to lead a public health revolution that has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people in the developing world. By switching from paper-based to mobile-enabled digital health systems, Zambian health workers are empowered with new ‘eyes and ears’ in the field-devices that increase the speed and accuracy with which vital health information can be collected and recorded. These PDAs, sometimes more powerful than laptops of the recent past, quickly are becoming a vital public health management tool.