{"id":4377,"date":"2008-03-07T18:58:08","date_gmt":"2008-03-08T01:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/2008\/03\/07\/clueless-remarks-from-chairman-martin\/"},"modified":"2008-03-07T18:58:08","modified_gmt":"2008-03-08T01:58:08","slug":"clueless-remarks-from-chairman-martin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/07\/clueless-remarks-from-chairman-martin\/","title":{"rendered":"Clueless remark from Chairman Martin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<a href=\"http:\/\/www.multichannel.com\/article\/CA6539635.html\">Multichannel News<\/a> has reported that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin made an exceptionally clueless remark about Comcast today:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nMartin added that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153two of the more troubling aspects\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of the Comcast matter was that in his view Comcast at first denied the allegations, though he didn&#8217;t specify the nature of the allegations or the denials.<\/p>\n<p>He said he was also troubled by allegations that Comcast altered certain user information in packets to effect a delay in peer-to-peer transmissions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The first remark is spot-on, as Comcast clearly hurt itself by denying it was shaping traffic, but the second remark is clueless. Martin confuses the RST bit in the TCP header with &#8220;user information&#8221; when in fact it&#8217;s nothing of the kind. As <a href=\"ftp:\/\/ftp.isi.edu\/in-notes\/rfc3168.txt\">RFC 3168 says, it&#8217;s a control bit<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<em>There exist some middleboxes (firewalls, load balancers, or intrusion detection systems) in the Internet that either drop a TCP SYN packet configured to negotiate ECN, or respond with a RST. This document specifies procedures that TCP implementations may use to provide robust connectivity even in the presence of such equipment.<\/em> &#8211; p. 4\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I understand that Martin is a political creature and not an engineer, but is it too much to ask the head of the FCC to understand the difference between &#8220;user information&#8221; and network control?<\/p>\n<p>Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this guy needs to get over his blind hatred of cable companies. I don&#8217;t care if the cable guy ran over his dog, he needs to bring a little balance to his job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Multichannel News has reported that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin made an exceptionally clueless remark about Comcast today: Martin added that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153two of the more troubling aspects\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of the Comcast matter was that in his view Comcast at first denied the allegations, though he didn&#8217;t specify the nature of the allegations or the denials. He said &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/07\/clueless-remarks-from-chairman-martin\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Clueless remark from Chairman Martin&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-net-neutrality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-18B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}