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Burger King Makes the Case For Net Neutrality (variety.com)
An anonymous reader writes: By now you've probably seen Burger King's spoof ad on the decision by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to repeal net neutrality. In the ad, Burger King customers are informed that there are now three "lanes" for ordering Whoppers -- each with substantially different prices and waiting times. The ad has already generated over a million views on Youtube and is lighting up Twitter. One thing I missed the first time is that while the Burger King "counter service" is clearly in on the act, the customers are apparently real; they learn of the cockamamie scheme at the counter in the style of the old TV show Candid Camera. Variety notes that the video "ends with an apparent dig at FCC Chairman Ajit Pai [...] as the Burger King character is shown drinking from an oversized Reese's coffee mug. That is the type of coffee mug that Pai uses at FCC meetings."
Not exactly, but they do confuse the issue. If you notice, only the Wopper is being delayed, and it's being delayed despite being able to be served faster. Other sandwiches like Chicken (as pointed out in the ad) do not require waiting in the slow line.
If we assume Woppers are a substitute for torrents then the net neutrality parallel is obvious - unfortunately the target audience for the commercial won't make the connection.
Yeah, I agree it's a bad analogy. I think a better one would be a grocery store where each checkout line is a different speed and price, faster lines charging more, and the brand of the item you choose depends on which line you are allowed to queue up in. If you have a non-preferred brand of cereal, Kellogs and Post for example, you must join the slower lane. Oh, but you can pay extra to take the non-preferred brand into the express lane, which already includes preferred brands of General Mills who payed extra to be included in that lane by default.
I agree the analogy isn't perfect but, well, it's an analogy do it "can't" be perfect.
Personally, I found the video both funny and entertaining. And, more importantly, it reached a lot of ordinary people and tell them that killing net neutrality is a bad thing. And that worth more than the best analogy we could come with.
Elok
seems more like you don't understand how an analogy works. the set of all hamburger restaurants isn't "the internet" in this case. this single BK restaurant is "the internet", or monopoly gateway to is. in the context of the ad, the whopper is like netflix or something. you can get the chicken sandwich, which is the ISP video, with no delays. but you may have to wait (or get your whopper throughput throttled) if you don't pay for a premium line. the analogy totally works, if you don't attempt to over-analyze it with "that's not really how..." irrelevant reasoning.
You mean like paying UPS ground for a 12-pack of socks instead of next day air?
Can you imagine UPS or Fedex doing the same commercial and everyone saying, "yeah, that makes sense."
Did it? I mean, I've heard about the video, but I haven't bothered watching it, because it's a Burger King commercial and I don't care.
You're on Slashdot so I'm pretty sure you're aware about the importance of Net Neutrality. So it doesn't matter if "you" saw the video or not
As for the video, it was released 2 days ago and it already have +2.5 M views so I think we can agree it reached a "lot" of ordinary people that doesn't have a clue about what Net Neutrality mean : https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Plus, even if it did, so what? Had they released this before the FCC vote, it might have mattered. Granted it still wouldn't have, but it might have. But the FCC vote is over. Net neutrality is dead. It's never coming back.
Is it? I live in Canada and, as far as I know, it's pretty much alive here. USA Rest of the World
And I wouldn't be so sure that democrat won't cancel this. I got the feeling that the next democrat president will take a linking to destroy everything that Trump made.
So what's the point to doing the video now?
Well, to sell shitty hamburgers, of course, under the guise of "informing the public." Who aren't informed and largely don't care about the boring details of net neutrality.
Unless you want the Net Neutrality to stay dead, why would you bother that Burger King spend its own money to teach people about it? Of course it's a publicity stunt, but they could have instead created 4 different flavor of Whopper : https://www.gq.com/story/new-d...
Elok
But only Burger King has the whopper, which is their point.
ISPs could throttle your access to Netflix, Hulu and YouTube for example.
#DeleteFacebook
So junk food restaurant chains are not allowed to voice their opinion? Especially in areas where such policies may affect their business.
Chick-fil-A is mostly located in the Bible Belt, so being overly liberal could effect its business.
Papa Johns needs an army of low paid workers, having them pay for health insurance will hit their business model.
Burger King I expect needs net neutrality, as it is trying to get back into the game, the once #2 burger chain, is loosing a lot of ground. For it to try to get press again, they need to advertise on the cheaper routs of the internet. Having there voice being blocked means they will not be able to run their business.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
... to be able to choose more to get faster service at a restaurant.
Would it be awesome to have to pay more to get functional service at a restaurant? Because that's the actual scenario.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If BK actually had such a policy, their customers would shop elsewhere starting tomorrow -- obviously.
There is no 'elsewhere' for 1 in 3 households in America. There are plenty of small towns with only one or two restaurants in them. The situation becomes worse if you actually expand the metaphor to multiple restaurants, because municipalities create protectionist artificial scarcity there, too. You can only purchase food from a business with a license to sell you food. Municipalities control the distribution of these licenses on specious bases. For example, lots of places don't permit food trucks, or they make it prohibitively expensive to operate one — you have to apply for permits over and over again for each county you want to operate in. This isn't so bad in states with few counties, but California has something like 56 of them and just operating in half of the state means that you've got dozens to deal with. And California is where the people live.
At both ends of the loop road I live on, people can get cable or DSL. But in the middle where I live, all I can get is access from a WISP which charges me $99/mo for 250GB at 6Mbps. What year is it? We paid the telcos to build out the last mile, and they pocketed over $450M and in fact paid the money out to executives in the form of bonuses. What if Taco Bell wins the fast food wars, and all restaurants are Taco Bell?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Imagine if you couldn't call Pizza Hut without paying an additional $15 to Verizon, because Pizza Hut refused to pay Verizon for "access" to their customers. But if you call Papa John's, you get a 20% discount on your order because Papa John's *did* pay Verizon for access to the customers.
Now extend that to every phone call you make. Imagine if the only calls you could make for "free" (as part of your plan) were to individuals and businesses that are paying for the privilege of having Verizon customers call them without additional charges.
THAT is why not having net neutrality is bad. The entire internet will rapidly become pay-per-view, and only the BIGGEST companies will be able to afford to pay-off the bandwidth providers/ISPs to make their content "free".
But that's the point; utility poles aren't on the property of the ISP. They are on municipal property (or private property with municipal easements) and the municipality has every right to regulate how they are maintained and who can use them. In many places, the poles were originally installed by the electrical utility and telcos and cable companies are just free-riders.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
They could completely block the competing news service, or worse, block the registration site for the other party if they're political or if internet voting ever became a thing, block areas that might vote for the other party. ISP's could have a lot of political power by being the gatekeepers to various political sites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Net Neutrality as it was written is pointless and is anything but what it should be. I really wish people would realize that - it doesn't fix the problem and makes it seem like the issue is private companies running amok, instead of the real issue being seen: there is extremely little competition in the last mile, especially in rural areas. This has to do with what others mentioned - access to poles, monopolies from both cities and large multi-tenant units, etc. This isn't about traffic prioritization, it's about lack of competition due to regulations/laws/case law.
Further, the law itself did absolutely nothing in making sure that companies can't effectively "prioritize" traffic anyway, see #1 below.
1. Only artificially limiting bandwidth via rate shaping, etc is covered by the old law. Technical "limitations" are not. You can't require an ISP to setup more peering points, increase transit, etc. ISP's use transit (generic traffic) and peering (sending traffic to a specific company.) Most major companies like to peer since it is generally far, far cheaper than paying for transit. If Comcast is peering with Netflix and only has a 100 mbps connection to them, but the actual bandwidth required from Netflix should be more like 1000 mbps without causing slowdowns, they can simply not facilitate increasing that. It costs money (to Comcast and Netflix) to increase that bandwidth between each other, so who pays for it, especially if that utilization is heavily one-sided? Same scenario will happen, but, a different "cause".
2. Having something labeled "Net neutrality" does not make it so. The only reason people haven't left the incumbent carriers in droves is because they have no other choice in many areas. You remove the barriers to competition and it will fix this situation without having the federal government needing to pass pointless laws.
3. Net Neutrality was passed in 2015, how many years prior did the internet exist and the world did end...