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Burger King Has an Opinion on Net Neutrality

347 points by Dangeranger 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Shivetya 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Makes me think of the Maddox rant against Arby's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15KejoG56uQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15KejoG56uQ
SilasX 9y ago
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.
- scaryclam 9y ago
  You make some valid points, but considering that the anti-net neutrality folks are making some terrible comparisons and lies to lure the public into backing them, is it really so bad for burger king to do the same?
  - bllguo 9y ago
    yes? What's the point of combatting misinformation with misinformation? not as bad of course, plus the intentions seem good, but still.
    - nly 9y ago
      When your opponent will win at any cost, sometimes you just have to do the same. We saw bad (but winning) analogies in the UK media with the refendum on voting reform[0]. Ultimately the pro-reform side didnt have good analogies, and people failed to understand what they were voting for. FPTP is easy to explain and feels fair when explained in the laziest way. "One person, one vote" was the winning campaign slogan. Powerful stuff. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum,_2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vot...
  - ikeboy 9y ago
    What lies are being used?
    - weaksauce 9y ago
      the main one I have seen them say is that "we didn't have net neutrality back in the day and everything was great" when there was throttling and disabling of services that actually triggered NN to be codified as law.
      - ikeboy 9y ago
        Well the more careful claim it that none of the violations were that bad and definitely not enough to justify regulation across the board, Stratchery sketches out that argument reasonably well. I think it's broadly true that the internet was not, in fact, a dystopia during those times.
peeters 9y ago
> 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.
petee 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Ok, so only their us based subsidiary has a say, if that. That'd be like Huawei suddenly decided to have an opinion on the subject because they have a US branch...
  - petee 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      The alternative was to make Tim Hortons a US company, that would have sucked.
- tsomctl 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure they're still paying a nontrivial amount in taxes. At the very least, property taxes, sales tax, and their employees are paying income tax.
  - petee 9y ago
    Individual stores are franchies, so a US citizen is likely paying those taxes, not Burger King
Theodores 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
aphextron 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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-difference/ http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differen... 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.
kodablah 9y ago
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.
- whichfawkes 9y ago
  Fast food has competition, unlike internet service.
  - Elmar69 9y ago
    I feel as if competition could make ISP's strive to provide reliable and fast connections if they had competition.
  - crazy1van 9y ago
    Which I think illustrates how NN is just nibbling at the edges of the problem. Competition is the real solution. If we could get the same lobbying efforts and grass roots passion behind removing local barriers to entry in the ISP market as there is behind NN, I think we'd be much better off.
- jtgeibel 9y ago
  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.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    Right, so an extremely flawed analogy. Muddies the water I'd say, and I am disappointed it gets large coverage without pointing out the glaring flaw. But a nice way for them to get their name in the proverbial paper, let's just hope they haven't taken coverage away from more apt stories on the issue since there's surely a limit before saturation occurs.
Mikhail_Edoshin 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
rossta 9y ago
I have to admit, the dig with the oversized Reese's coffee cup at the end made me LOL.
seanbehan 9y ago
All their customers would just walk over to McDonald's instead.
- horsecaptin 9y ago
  Yeah, unlike Net Neutrality. Joke's on the internet customers!
exabrial 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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
- stochastic_monk 9y ago
  mikejarema pointed it out, but yes, WhopperCoin has been a thing for months.
earksiinni 9y ago
Nice mug at the end. Lookin' at you, Ajit Pai ;-)
biggieshellz 9y ago
Anyone else notice the name tags on the employees? Vint (Cerf) and Robert (Kahn)!
znpy 9y ago
Pure genius.
isoskeles 9y ago
In case you doubted the idea that corporations are people, they can have opinions now.
yunesj 9y ago
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-people-vulnerable-poor-nutrition-obesity http://frac.org/obesity-health/low-income-food-insecure-peop... [2] http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/ http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/ [3] http://www.businessinsider.com/restaurants-that-serve-coke-vs-pepsi-2013-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/restaurants-that-serve-coke-v...
- ukulele 9y ago
  Not to nit too much, but working class people certainly can afford to not eat fast food. In fact, it's cheaper and faster to cook simple meals. I believe you might have meant "working poor" instead.
- belorn 9y ago
  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.
rootlocus 9y ago
> 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?
dingo_bat 9y ago
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.
TruthBeDum123 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
british_india 9y ago
Burger King had been my favorite fast food--that is, until they did their inversion with the Canadian company Tim Hortons. After that, I have not and will never spend a nickel in Burger King. Inversion = Boycott.
teekert 9y ago
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.
b0ner_t0ner 9y ago
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.
_rav 9y ago
This could actually be in a South Park episode.

347 points by Dangeranger 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

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 9y ago
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.
djsumdog 9y ago
Makes me think of the Maddox rant against Arby's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15KejoG56uQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15KejoG56uQ

SilasX 9y ago

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.

scaryclam 9y ago
You make some valid points, but considering that the anti-net neutrality folks are making some terrible comparisons and lies to lure the public into backing them, is it really so bad for burger king to do the same?
- bllguo 9y ago
  yes? What's the point of combatting misinformation with misinformation? not as bad of course, plus the intentions seem good, but still.
  - nly 9y ago
    When your opponent will win at any cost, sometimes you just have to do the same. We saw bad (but winning) analogies in the UK media with the refendum on voting reform[0]. Ultimately the pro-reform side didnt have good analogies, and people failed to understand what they were voting for. FPTP is easy to explain and feels fair when explained in the laziest way. "One person, one vote" was the winning campaign slogan. Powerful stuff. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum,_2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vot...
- ikeboy 9y ago
  What lies are being used?
  - weaksauce 9y ago
    the main one I have seen them say is that "we didn't have net neutrality back in the day and everything was great" when there was throttling and disabling of services that actually triggered NN to be codified as law.
    - ikeboy 9y ago
      Well the more careful claim it that none of the violations were that bad and definitely not enough to justify regulation across the board, Stratchery sketches out that argument reasonably well. I think it's broadly true that the internet was not, in fact, a dystopia during those times.

peeters 9y ago

> 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.

petee 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Ok, so only their us based subsidiary has a say, if that. That'd be like Huawei suddenly decided to have an opinion on the subject because they have a US branch...
- petee 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    The alternative was to make Tim Hortons a US company, that would have sucked.
tsomctl 9y ago
I'm pretty sure they're still paying a nontrivial amount in taxes. At the very least, property taxes, sales tax, and their employees are paying income tax.
- petee 9y ago
  Individual stores are franchies, so a US citizen is likely paying those taxes, not Burger King

Theodores 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago

aphextron 9y ago

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 9y ago
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-difference/ http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differen... 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.

kodablah 9y ago

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.

whichfawkes 9y ago
Fast food has competition, unlike internet service.
- Elmar69 9y ago
  I feel as if competition could make ISP's strive to provide reliable and fast connections if they had competition.
- crazy1van 9y ago
  Which I think illustrates how NN is just nibbling at the edges of the problem. Competition is the real solution. If we could get the same lobbying efforts and grass roots passion behind removing local barriers to entry in the ISP market as there is behind NN, I think we'd be much better off.
jtgeibel 9y ago
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.
- kodablah 9y ago
  Right, so an extremely flawed analogy. Muddies the water I'd say, and I am disappointed it gets large coverage without pointing out the glaring flaw. But a nice way for them to get their name in the proverbial paper, let's just hope they haven't taken coverage away from more apt stories on the issue since there's surely a limit before saturation occurs.

Mikhail_Edoshin 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

rossta 9y ago

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

seanbehan 9y ago

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

horsecaptin 9y ago
Yeah, unlike Net Neutrality. Joke's on the internet customers!

exabrial 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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
stochastic_monk 9y ago
mikejarema pointed it out, but yes, WhopperCoin has been a thing for months.

earksiinni 9y ago

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

biggieshellz 9y ago

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

znpy 9y ago

Pure genius.

isoskeles 9y ago

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

yunesj 9y ago

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-people-vulnerable-poor-nutrition-obesity http://frac.org/obesity-health/low-income-food-insecure-peop... [2] http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/ http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/ [3] http://www.businessinsider.com/restaurants-that-serve-coke-vs-pepsi-2013-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/restaurants-that-serve-coke-v...

ukulele 9y ago
Not to nit too much, but working class people certainly can afford to not eat fast food. In fact, it's cheaper and faster to cook simple meals. I believe you might have meant "working poor" instead.
belorn 9y ago
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.

rootlocus 9y ago

> 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?

dingo_bat 9y ago

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.

TruthBeDum123 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

british_india 9y ago

Burger King had been my favorite fast food--that is, until they did their inversion with the Canadian company Tim Hortons. After that, I have not and will never spend a nickel in Burger King. Inversion = Boycott.

teekert 9y ago

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.

b0ner_t0ner 9y ago

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.

_rav 9y ago

This could actually be in a South Park episode.