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Sen. Jim DeMint's (R-SC) announcement that he will resign from the Senate opens up the top Republican position on a powerful committee. Sen DeMint was set to succeed Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) as the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee until he revealed that he would step down to lead the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The Commerce Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), has jurisdiction over communications policy, technology, interstate commerce, transportation, aviation and other key areas. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) is the next most senior Republican on the committee, but he was also recently reelected as conference chairman. It is unclear whether he would be allowed to keep his party leadership role and take on the ranking member position. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) would be the next Republican in line after Sen Thune on the panel.

Parents overwhelmingly say they object to the collection of personal information on children over the Internet, according to a new poll released just before federal officials are set to vote on a controversial proposal to strengthen child privacy laws.

According to a survey released by child-advocacy groups, nine out of 10 adults said they believed advertisers should get a parent’s permission before collecting the name, address or other personal data of a user under 13. Those businesses should never be able to ask for a child’s location or information about a child’s friends, respondents said. The survey of 2,000 adults comes amid a debate over how far federal regulators can go to protect the privacy of children without stepping on the business practices of the fast-growing and aggressive Web, media and mobile-phone industries. Current law is fuzzy on how much information these firms can collect on minors through social networks and mobile devices. The Federal Trade Commission is poised to vote this month on revisions to a 1998 law written in the desktop-computer age. Proposed updates to that law would require permission from parents to track children online with cookies and other tools used by advertisers to create profiles of users.

President Obama's re-election campaign ran "the greatest digital operation in the history of politics," Zac Moffatt, digital director for Mitt Romney, said. "I don't begrudge them." In contrast, Moffatt said he thinks his team struggled the most with the rapid need to "scale out" and staff up following the extended GOP primary. "Build bigger" is his advice when it comes to digital teams for future presidential campaigns. "We ran out of runway," he said, and described his dream scenario as one where he could put together a dream team of people at least two years in advance. "If I could do it again, I'd do it as an incumbent," he laughed.

Pandora's music royalty costs, typically paid in tenths of a cent, are skyrocketing. At the same time, the more people who listen to Pandora via mobile devices, such as on smartphones, tablets or through car dashboards, the less advertisers pay to reach those listeners, compared to the ones listening on desktop or laptop computers. In other words, the more successful Pandora becomes, the more it loses. And those through-the-looking-glass economics of Internet radio set off the drop in Pandora shares.

Pandora's audience statistics would be the envy of many media companies: In the most recent quarter, it had 59.2 million active users who listened to nearly 3.6 billion hours of music. And they appear highly loyal: its giant 47% uptick in active users was outpaced by a 67% increase in the amount of music served, meaning more people are using the service to listen to more music than ever. Yet because Pandora must pay record companies and music publishers for every one of those "listens," its "content acquisition" costs—the price it pays the owners of all that music—rose nearly 75%. At $65.7 million, those costs ate up nearly 55% of Pandora's revenue for the three months ended Oct. 31.