Nexstar and Sinclair TV stations sold a record amount of ads to political candidates, their supporters and issue advertisers in the run up to Tuesday’s elections, their executives told investors Wednesday after reporting Q3 results. Both companies expect their total 2010 political sales to exceed those of 2008 despite the lack of a presidential election this year. “The category is just absolutely explosive,” said Steve Marks, chief operating officer of Sinclair’s TV division.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cybersecurity officials from the National Security Agency and ICANN agreed Wednesday that infrastructure measures such as using the DNSSec specifications are the most efficient ways to protect government and other networks. But they disagreed sharply at the Military Communications Conference over the benefits of introducing strong authentication.

Republicans won almost all races Tuesday in the eight states with utility commission seats up for grabs. That means Republican majority commissions in many of these states.

The wave of incoming freshmen legislators in the House had little early help from the telecom, media and technology industries, an analysis of campaign finance data shows. Among non-incumbent candidates who won seats in the House or Senate, only a handful received more than $5,000 in direct contributions from the large political action committees associated with those industries by October. We looked at contributions made to candidates by PACs including those of USTelecom, NCTA, NAB, CTIA, Verizon, AT&T, CWA, Qwest, Comcast, Disney Employees, Clear Channel, Google and Microsoft, based on Federal Elections Commission data compiled by CQ Moneyline. Contributions made within the final eight weeks of the campaign aren’t yet reflected in the available data.

Losing won’t keep former high-tech executives from continuing to seek high public office, experts said. They said the defeats Tuesday in California of Republican nominees Meg Whitman from eBay for governor and Carly Fiorina for U.S. Senate won’t deter others. Both personal and industry reasons were cited.

With election uncertainty overhanging the FCC and every other institution in Washington, there have been fewer ex parte meetings at the agency in the past month than what has become the norm, a review of filings showed. Eighth-floor officials confirmed this trend.

The Coalition of Concerned Utilities criticized the pole-attachment provisions of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, saying the commission’s recommendations were so “one-sided” that they can’t support any FCC actions, “let alone ones that potentially impact the safe and efficient operation of electric utility distribution systems across the country.”

The FCC media ownership review due to Congress in 2010 has been further delayed (CD May 18 p4), and a final order is unlikely until the second half of next year, agency officials said. They said the reasons include a lag in getting from Congress money that the commission needed to pay for outsiders such as professors to study media ownership (CD Aug 9 p6). The FCC’s focus on broadband, the difficulty of completing the quadrennial review on time -- which has never been done before -- and career Media Bureau staffers focusing on reviewing Comcast’s multibillion dollar purchase of control in NBC Universal are other explanations, agency and industry officials said.

The FCC is looking to Capitol Hill for action on retransmission consent rules, perhaps by new legislation, instead of acting now on the issue, officials at and outside the commission said Monday. Almost 15 days into their retrans dispute, Cablevision and News Corp. over the weekend ended a blackout, restoring Fox TV stations as well as several cable channels to the cable operator’s subscribers. Fox and Dish Network averted a separate retrans blackout Friday, signing a long-term deal. With those negotiations wrapped up for now, the commission doesn’t seem poised to take regulatory action on the issue, FCC and other officials said.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The U.S. military hasn’t gotten across adequately to policymakers involved in shuffling spectrum how it’s used for national and homeland security and why the uses are crucial, a Pentagon official said Monday. “Some important people don’t understand” these matters, said Steve Molina, director of strategic planning in the Defense Information Systems Administration’s Defense Spectrum Organization. “We need to do a better job of educating folks."