
Burger King Has an Opinion on Net Neutrality - Dangeranger
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-24/net-neutrality-movement-finds-a-fast-food-friend-in-burger-king
======
SilasX
Clever ad spot, but I think this is confusing the debate more than clarifying:

1)

>Video portrays a world where patrons pay more for fast service

Paying more for faster service is orthogonal to Net Neutrality. Of course you
can pay more for a fatter pipe. No one has a problem with this. The issue is
_preferentially_ charging for data based on who is dumping it to their side of
that pipe.

2) In the food world, you can already, likewise, pay more for better quality
food. No one has a problem with that.

3) You can also, more controversially, bribe or tip the staff to get
preferential service. That's widely accepted. The food service world is
already more like net non-neutrality.

~~~
Bodell
Just to play devils advocate for a moment :)

1) The video showed that you could receive a chicken sandwich now. That you
were only paying more to receive only ,specifically, a whooper faster. This I
thought shows preferential treatment over different types of food (data).

2) the quality of the food was not an issue in this video everyone was
receiving the 'same' whooper, presumably.

3) The example burger king made was not quite the same as bribing a Maitre d'
to get a table faster than other customers due to limited table resources. The
video showed them withholding whoopers that were already made and ready to go,
for a certain time-frame, in order to shake down the customer for more money.
The idea that others who paid more for their whooper got it faster, due to
limited supply of whoopers, was not the issue. The issue was that burger king
would be falsely creating a pipeline delay, simply to get money out of the end
user.

Although, all metaphors will be mostly speculation, as far as how it will
directly relate to future ISP behavior and it's relationship with the end
users. How exactly US ISP's decide to use the repeal of net neutrality,
debatably, remains to be seen. It would be quite hard to form a 100% accurate
metaphor for something that hasn't been fully realized quite yet. I do not
mean this to imply that the behavior would in anyway be good. simply that the
specifics of it are still unknown.

As a side note I like to think burger king is also inadvertently creating a
self-deprecating metaphor. I hope that in the Internet world it is also only
the shitty food that is being tiered. If you have to pay more to get Google,
Facebook, Amazon (terrible junk food) then no worries for me. Unfortunately
that bit of speculation is probably way to optimistic. ;)

~~~
djsumdog
Yea, the chicken sandwich example is .. interesting. I mean it works in this
really basic example and I think it will help the lay-person get the general
idea.

A more accurate analogy would be in a food court:

For free, you're allowed to access Taco Hell, Burger Thing, and Mc Doubles.

For $5/month, you get a special pass that also sets you access Suppression
Chicken[1], Pizza Slut and Baskin Toboggans

For $8/month, you get an extended pass that lets you get into the line for a
few more diabetes joins.

You can get in any of those lines without a pass, but it will cost $1/visit.

This is of course, limitation of service (which is already done in some
countries, like Optus Australia which gives you unmetered Facebook and Twitter
that doesn't count against your mobile data), or African ISPs that give people
free Wikipedia (which is arguably, kinda a good thing -- which is what makes
this tricky).

The other aspect is quality of service. Say you could get to all those fast
food joins for free, but you bought passes that put you in different positions
in the queues (which is more like what we see with the Burger King example).
It's like the airport pre-check. Pay government extortion prices and you get
to jump to the front of the line, while everyone else gets molested by the
TSA.

[1] Chick-Fil-A .. if you didn't get that one

Edit: formatting

~~~
Spivak
I think the problem with this analogy is that nobody would argue that a mall
or theme park doesn't have the right to do this. Hell delivery services could
also do this too without much fuss. If Taco Hell wants to pay DoorStash to get
preferential treatment on deliveries or to be excmpted from delivery fees they
wouldn't even have to be sneaky about it -- both companies would probably
advertise it as a feature.

~~~
smileysteve
> nobody would argue that a mall or theme park doesn't have the right to do
> this

I feel like the DisneyWorld / SixFlags priority / qbot system is all the
commercial we should need to explain why fast lanes are bad. You can ride 4
rides in the time I stand in one line? you elitist pig.

------
yunesj
You may think this is funny, but Burger King is actually burger-washing a very
serious issue.

Not only is fast food convenient, it is essential to the most vulnerable in
our society. Burger King provides food fast and cheaply. Simply stated,
working class people cannot afford not to eat fast food [1].

In many locations, Burger King is the only fast food restaurant in the area
[2]. In many of those same locations, public transit is inadequate for the
purposes of going to a competing fast food restaurant. Establishing a fast
food restaurant that can compete with Burger King requires so much work and
capital that doing so is impossible for someone already working two jobs. For
all intents and purposes, Burger King has a monopoly on an essential service.

Here's where it gets scary. Burger King preferentially serves proprietary,
branded food items, and beverages from Coca-Cola, for which they've made an
exclusive, behind-closed-doors deal... for money [3]. Have you ever noticed
that it's impossible to get a McDonald's Burger or a Pepsi at a Burger King?
With customers being shut out from these discussions, it's not surprising that
the products they serve are unhealthy.

The common sense solution to all of this is to classify fast food joints as
public utilities, and then demand that they serve food without regard to its
origin. Fast food is far more important than high speed internet. And while
the repeal of net neutrality regulations lead to the death of the internet...
the lack of food neutrality will lead to death.

/s

[1] [http://frac.org/obesity-health/low-income-food-insecure-
peop...](http://frac.org/obesity-health/low-income-food-insecure-people-
vulnerable-poor-nutrition-obesity)

[2] [http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/](http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/)

[3] [http://www.businessinsider.com/restaurants-that-serve-
coke-v...](http://www.businessinsider.com/restaurants-that-serve-coke-vs-
pepsi-2013-12)

~~~
belorn
The problem with this analogy is that the government don't give out the only
available land to Burger King restaurants for free while at the same time make
it practically impossible for any other restaurants to get access to land and
compete. Government created monopolies on food access are indeed a major issue
in nations which has had that (east Germany, war time rationing) and it would
be more important than high speed internet.

Thankfully this doesn't happen with Burger King. Burger joints are common
simply because the ease of starting one up and access to customers. No
requirement to go and dig cables on government land, no last mile issues, just
make a safe building and edible food and off you go.

~~~
yunesj
In many places, the government's barriers to entry are worse for a fast food
restaurant [1] than for, e.g., creating a WISP. So, I don't think your
argument breaks the analogy.

[1]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/01/why-o...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/01/why-
one-major-city-will-no-longer-let-fast-food-outlets-open-near-
schools/?utm_term=.1ca1e35b41b9)

------
peeters
> Burger King restaurants are independent franchisees but the brand is owned
> by Restaurant Brands International, based in Ontario, Canada.

While it's true that the headquarters is in Ontario, RBI is majority owned by
3G Capital out of Brazil. They moved the RBI HQ to Ontario ostensibly for tax
reasons when they acquired Tim Horton's. Burger King's HQ still appears to be
in Miami. So I'm not sure if it's wholly honest to make this seem like a
Canadian company doing this, they're just the middle parent of a U.S. HQ >
Canada HQ > Brazil HQ ownership chain.

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biggieshellz
Anyone else notice the name tags on the employees? Vint (Cerf) and Robert
(Kahn)!

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aphextron
Perhaps we can just embrace this new reality of corporate decision making in
politics, and game the system. If companies like Burger King can be brought to
the consumer's side on certain issues, perhaps it's possible to rally many
others to bring powerful special interests to heel. Imagine a future where
rather than jamming stupid advertisements down our throats, companies can just
straight up "buy" the good will of their consumers for a time by openly
opposing certain things legally. If the citizen's only worth to political
discourse is the amount of cash they have in the bank and how they spend it,
then maybe this is just the natural evolution of democracy to a more pure,
unpretentious form.

~~~
djsumdog
Special interest groups already dictate policy. There have been actual studies
on that, and I did a video on one of them a while back:

[http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-
differen...](http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-difference/)

I'm currently working on a post called "You can't vote with your purchases"
which is something I feel a lot of libertarians and capitalists spew out.
Don't like Wal-Mart? Don't shop there.

The trouble is you really can't. Edward Bernays and Anna Freud really changed
the game when they started teaching companies how to market to people
emotionally to draw them in. I know tons of people, myself included, who don't
shop at Wal-Mart, but it doesn't make a dent. Wal-Mart can still manipulate
millions of people with their extensive ad campaigns, and most people simply
don't care.

Tobacco companies got women to smoke more by disusing it as being part of
women's rights (look up Torches of Freedom).

McDonalds led a PR campaign against "frivolous lawsuits" from the women who
got 3rd degree, life threatening burns from their coffee, that people still
believe to this day
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNWh6Kw3ejQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNWh6Kw3ejQ)).

The Baptist church didn't put a dent in Disney by boycotting them. Even
MLKings Montgomery bus boycotts didn't succeed due to financial pressure. They
succeeded because the news and media attention got so huge that the Supreme
Court had to step in.

Every company does something unethical. Your processors are manufactured in
Malaysia by people who get paid barely enough to live on, your shoes are made
in Africa by companies driving people off their land and into the cities to
work in factories, your shirts are made in South American sweat shops .. just
by living in a high income country (US, EU, AU, even Russia) you are part of a
river of exploitation (the book The Culture of Make Believe goes into this in
detail).

To vote with purchases requires all the actors to be active, uncompromising
and aware .. and that simply never will be the case.

~~~
deevolution
There are efforts to record the history and origin of manufactured items using
bkockchain in the supply chain. It will probably end up increasing the price
of the items though because only items created in a sustainable way will want
to publish to a public ledger. You will be able to vote with purchase, it will
just become increadibly expenisve to do so.

------
kodablah
Seems to show the opposite point: there is no law requiring BK to not have a,
say, faster drive thru or counter for more money. Yet we survive.

~~~
jtgeibel
Well BK operates in a very competitive industry, and I'm not aware of any
major (or even minor) player doing something like this. I know if I was
waiting in line watching other people get their food first because they can
afford to pay a premium for that service (thus pushing my order further back
in the queue), I would ask for my money back and would not return because
there are hundreds of other food options available in my city. If BK was the
only food option available in my city (and local community supported
alternatives outlawed at the state level), then I guess I would just have to
live with it, or go without.

~~~
crazy1van
> If BK was the only food option available in my city (and local community
> supported alternatives outlawed at the state level)

Then the best solution would be to rally support to change the law to allow
more food options to operate in your city. Spending time trying to dictate
exactly how your one food option should operate its cashier line won't give
you nearly as improved a consumer experience as getting a few competitors to
open up.

------
rootlocus
> Burger King corporation believes they can sell more and make more money
> selling chicken sandwiches and chicken fries so now they're slowing down the
> access to the whopper.

Quoted from the video, this is the actual analogy that makes sense.

However, under no net neutrality, would customers be able to pay extra to get
faster access to services that are pushed to the slow lane like the customers
here can pay for the whopper?

------
Theodores
Being vegetarian the bar is quite high when it comes to burger companies and
their marketing efforts - I am not going to be spending money in Burger King
ever. However, after seeing this ad I do think that Burger King have a bit
more to them than that rival burger chain.

They have been smart here because nobody wants to pay more for priority
interwebs access - the fast lane pass. But actually they have done a good job
of hopping on this bandwagon. It is okay to be against the government on
something like this where riots are not going to happen, it is tame.

Now they could not do this jump on the bandwagon marketing with the other
thing of the moment - crypto currency addiction, but this could be on either
the side of government or the bitcoin-bores.

If they sided with government and went the extra mile to protect their
customers from spending their money on alt-coins then there would be a lot of
the bitcoin addicted that would take issue with this (probably starting with
the semantics of bitcoin). Burger King could have a parody pyramid scheme
burger store where none of the food was regulated, just regurgitated. People
could be HODLing onto their burgers and fries could end up being used to back
a new blockchain based currency for burgers, so everyone could convert their
useless fiat money into fries, with those fries being convertible to good as
gold bitcoin at any time, subject to transaction fees that can be paid in USD
or BTC. Naturally there would be a fixed 22 billion fries to buy, no more. And
funny stories about people who bought a pizza with ten million fries not
realising how many burgers you could get with that.

Of course such a marketing campaign would alienate lots of customers, even if
it was educational. So the net neutrality topic is extremely conveniently tame
plus they can take the people vs the government on it, to play the underdog.

~~~
daveguy
I'm not sure why you wouldn't spend money in a burger king as a vegetarian.
They are one of the few burger chains that offers a vegetarian burger. If you
ask for a veggie burger in Wendy's they'll give you a bun with lettuce and
tomato. If you ask in a McDonald's they'll just laugh at you.

Don't get me wrong, Burger king is absolutely disgusting food no matter your
dietary restrictions. But at least they try.

Also their advertising campaigns make me want to smash my TV, Alexa and
computer.

~~~
okreallywtf
They've had one for years too, I remember being pretty young and them being
the only chain almost (aside from taco bell) that we could go to. It isn't a
_good_ veggie burger really, but at least they tried.

------
Shivetya
This a great example of a great marketing team. Capitalize on a trending news
item. While you may upset some people you will just as likely get a smirk out
of them. Yet in all cases your name gets more exposure which is still
important regardless of your position in the market.

~~~
Apocryphon
Given that BK is also launching WhopperCoin in Russia, they've definitely done
a good job adopting tech fads for the sake of news exposure. Eat your heart
out, Denny's Twitter account marketing team.

------
seanbehan
All their customers would just walk over to McDonald's instead.

~~~
horsecaptin
Yeah, unlike Net Neutrality. Joke's on the internet customers!

------
teekert
Burger King has a pretty nifty marketing team, probably with some half geeks
in there (or full, i.e. see comment of biggieshellz below). Nothing more,
nothing less. Remember their Google home calling commercial? There will be
more of this, way more, from many more companies.

------
TruthBeDum123
Why is BK trying to look so stupid. They appear to actually be for net-
neutrality by showing a non-regulated BK that has a bunch of crazy things that
no one would ever pay for like a $26 fast lane Whopper. It's scare mongering
and playing on emotions really.

But the irony is there is no burger-neutrality in the real world and none of
the featured horrors has happened. There is a free market that has prevented
all of the things they are espousing that a free market internet would cause
(but somehow has not occurred in other markets). So it is like they are making
an argument against net-neutrality.

Am I missing something here?

Perhaps they are just saying that if BK had zero competition, there would be
price gouging somehow. But there IS competition in the ISP market for almost
everyone. If ISP's ever start doing crazy things, it's just going to open up
the door for more competitors too. In some places where there wasn't good
competition. ISP's were told they couldn't do certain things because of
antitrust laws. Net Neutrality is a solution looking for a problem.

I see people exclaiming their shame often of the lack of good internet service
in the USA compared to Hong Kong ETC. I know the geographical challenges are
often stated as a reason why. That is true in some cases, but what many people
don't realize is that government has made it too difficult and expensive for
competitors to come into the market. Bit ISP's have even lobbied for more laws
and regulations in some cases because they can afford it and it will actually
cost them less than having competition.

So government causes a problem with laws and regulations that it passes, then
people want it to pass more laws to compensate for a hypothetical problem that
the government in the first place. So in the end we have all this bureaucracy
mucking everything up just to get us back to the equilibrium that a free
market had brought us to and people are actually OK with this??? I am
seriously boggled.

Less regulation in this space will spur more and more competition. Antitrust
laws and media pressure + PR has been absolutely adequate. What am I missing?

~~~
badmadrad
BK pandering to the ever increasing socialist millennial. Which my generation
has been unfortunately tricked into. And despite all the down-votes from all
my socialist friends on this site, you are absolutely correct. The BK depicted
in this ad would fail and fail spectacularly. It would take 1 company making
burgers at a flat predictable cost/speed and this BK would have to change it's
policy to survive. In the end, the consumer always wins in the free market.
But these socialists think more government is the answer to all of societies
ills. They will just create more stagnation and problems they claim to fight.

------
Mikhail_Edoshin
This is a strange analogy. A better picture of what food neutrality is would
be a menu with identical prices for every meal, be it a three-store burger or
a 1 oz of ketchup.

~~~
dx034
But it's easy to understand for people with a non-tech background. If they had
made it more realistic (representing how net neutrality really affects
people), it would've been much less entertaining and harder to understand. The
analogy of no net neutrality=slow access to service is easy to get for
customers and still somewhat true.

------
dingo_bat
By this logic, the FDA should make a burger-neutrality law, which would
prevent burger joints from making people wait for their food unless they pay
extra.

------
exabrial
Burger King is known for their odd marketing campaigns... I won't be surprised
if we see them launch their own crypto currency too

~~~
Shikadi
Guess I should invest in their stock in case they do announce something crypto
related soon, it's only a matter of time before they read your comment and
take the idea

~~~
mikejarema
Too late! WhopperCoin has been out for months. Seriously, although seems to be
limited to Russia.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41082388](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41082388)

------
rossta
I have to admit, the dig with the oversized Reese's coffee cup at the end made
me LOL.

------
isoskeles
In case you doubted the idea that corporations are people, they can have
opinions now.

------
earksiinni
Nice mug at the end. Lookin' at you, Ajit Pai ;-)

------
_rav
This could actually be in a South Park episode.

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b0ner_t0ner
Pretty good actors. (Some) real folks would’ve pulled out a handgun... which
they won't be able to do sitting at home, angry at their ISP.

------
znpy
Pure genius.

------
petee
They're hoping we forget they moved out of the US to avoid paying taxes; its
nice they want to raise awareness, but you ditched the US, so your opinion
doesn't matter here anymore.

I'm a strong believer of "If you don't vote, you can't bitch" :)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
They moved out of the US to avoid paying taxes on worldwide income, they still
pay taxes on US income - all foreign companies that operate in the US do! Just
like all US companies that operate in Canada pay Canadian corporate income
taxes...

No taxation without representation.

~~~
petee
Anyways, the core point was they moved out to avoid paying taxes, and that's
exactly what they did. The $2 left isn't worth talking about

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The alternative was to make Tim Hortons a US company, that would have sucked.

