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In meetings with Federal Communications Commission officials members of the NBC Television Affiliates board -- led by president/chairman Jordan Wertlieb of Hearst and Ralph Oakley, vice chairman of the affiliates group and president of Quincy Newspapers -- said they were concerned that if the FCC conducts simultaneous incentive auctions, "there will be no safety net available in the event that the predictive engineering models have miscalculated the amount of spectrum actually necessary to repack the remaining television stations" consistent with the statutory mandate to preserve coverage areas and populations. They told the FCC officials that such preservation must be in fact, not simply in theory. They also called for a fair, transparent and "technically sound" auction process, all of which the FCC has pledged to do.

While they were there, the affiliates also talked about what they said were their other issues of greatest concern. Those were that the retransmission consent regime is working and that government intrusion would unfairly benefit Pay TV operators, and that the FCC needs to relax media ownership rules.

A new report released by eBay found that 97 percent of its sellers export their products to another country. Despite their sellers' success in reaching new global markets, eBay urged policymakers to take steps that would help lower obstacles to international e-commerce.

Using data gathered from the thousands of sellers on the Internet auction and marketplace site, eBay's study found 80 percent of those who said they export products do business in five or more countries. And many of eBay's sellers have one or just a few employees, said eBay Director of Global Fulfillment Mark Mastandrea at a panel discussion on the report. The study found that the Internet has made it easier to reach customers abroad by reducing the costs and difficulty of advertising, communicating with customers, and collecting payments. However, challenges remain in actually moving products across borders, said Brian Bieron, eBay's senior director of federal government relations. At the event, eBay and other industry officials argued that the current trade regime is not designed to support small sellers like the ones that utilize eBay and other Internet platforms to reach customers. Given this, eBay is pushing policymakers to make several changes that would make international trade easier for "micro" sellers. They include reducing the customs challenges for smaller sellers by increasing the "de minimis" threshold, which is the value of goods that can enter a country duty free, and creating trusted trader programs for smaller sellers between the United States and other countries.

An initiative to drastically reduce the number of federal websites has been making slow but steady progress during the last few months. There were 1,091 non-redirecting federal websites on a list maintained by the General Services Administration when I checked just a few days ago. As of Wednesday, the list is down to 1,084 unique sites. That’s compared to nearly 1,500 dot-govs during an official count in December. This progress is particularly worth noting because the British government, which U.S. technology officials have cited as a model for dot-gov reform, reached a milestone this week, pulling all government Web content into a single master domain.