Burger King Has an Opinion on Net Neutrality
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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.
not as bad of course, plus the intentions seem good, but still.
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_Vot...
I think it's broadly true that the internet was not, in fact, a dystopia during those times.
This has nothing to do with the recent order, it was legal before.
The consumer environment and drivers will be different, but the frustration will be the same.
My current favorite is: toll booths that charge you different amounts depending on your destination. Or, highways with different speed limits depending on your destination.
Seems to me a more apt analogy would be that they lower the speed limit across the board, and then charge drivers more to get the original speed limit back.
>Seems to me a more apt analogy would be that they lower the speed limit across the board, and then charge drivers more to get the original speed limit back.
That would be a jerk move, but not a violation of road/net neutrality since it applies equally to all.
(I generally don't like how people call every bad ISP practice a violation of net neutrality; not everything bad is a violation.)
I had in mind something more like a bridge toll. Two people leaving NYC, one going to New Jersey, the other to Pennsylvania. To get over the George Washington bridge, they are charged different amounts.
The bridge authority (Comcast) is in bed with Jersey (Netflix), so they have an incentive to Charge the PA people (Hulu) more and keep the Jersey traffic flowing.
A highway intentionally halving its speed limit, and then asking you money if you wish to drive fast (at the original speed limit)
An airline charging you extra if you have a certain brand of products in your checked bag, even though it’s within the weight allowances.
Yea the mid-west toll roads and the Chicago Skyway will charge per segment (I think). The DC metro system and Seattle's Link Lightrail also charges you based on how far you ride (you tap in and out and it calculates the fare based on zones traveled. Seattle just has two zones though).
A lot of transit systems charge by zone, and with network traffic you're really talking about fair relaying between all intermediate hops. The analogy doesn't really work. I don't think I'd try to use it.
I commuted the Maine Turnpike for a little over a year, and the difference between naive routing and toll-optimized routing could be five or six dollars a day.
In Cleveland, the Great Lakes Science Center sits directly between the stadium where the Browns play, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which are all on the same block. https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=41.508389&mlon=-81.6955&...
Now say the stadium and the Rock and Roll Hall of fame have an agreement where customers get their tolls covered, but the Science Center doesn't.
These arguments presuppose that rates will go up, and maybe they will. But then that's the real argument: you'll pay more for what you're getting today.
Net neutrality isn't always charging more for things. Often it's more like "all our mobile plans come with UNLIMITED data for Facebook and YouTube." Which actually seems nice for consumers but hurts any other site trying to inhabit the same space.
The most infamous example in the US is TMobile's Binge On, which has a pretty big list of participating services [1] including even a few porn sites. I just don't see evidence that this is tilting things further towards entrenched powers (yet).
1: https://www.t-mobile.com/offer/binge-on-streaming-video-list...
How do you qualify your service to get into that offering? What happens when t-mobile gets bought be someone who wants to make a youtube competitor?
What Binge On providers
are saying. Many of the
smaller video providers
rave about Binge On and
what it means for their
business:
Since joining Binge On,
we’ve seen twice the
flow of new T-Mobile
customers coming to the
app and spending twice
as long than customers
of the carriers.”
-- David Moffly,
CEO, Baeble Media
Of course there is always a catch. I was interested in what that catch currently looks like, since it will never be more mild than now. I've facetiously paraphrased it for ya'll (if you'd rather read the policy first hand, without the snark, I've linked it below)...
--------------------
Binge-On Content Provider Policy and Technical Criteria To be included, a content provider's video delivery will meet the following requirements:
A. [Allow us to identify and monitor your content, and we will help you degrade its quality, otherwise we'll make our best effort to degrade it for you lol]. Use of technology protocols which make detection of video difficult such as https and UDP require additional collaboration with T‐Mobile to enable the video detection.
B. [Any decisions to change the way you deliver video must flow through us.]. T-Mobile reserves the right to suspend the content provider’s participation in Binge On
C. [Your video content is all we want. You're a video streaming service, just stay a video streaming service. If you try to deliver other content, we will count that against our customers data cap].
D.The network caps the bandwidth to detectable videos to 1.5 Mbps and as a result, many video services will deliver videos at lower resolutions that will look good on mobile devices, typically 480p
F. T-Mobile reserves the right to [degrade] your content in the event of consistent failure to [degrade your own] content within our guidelines
[Lastly, for those that want to opt-out, fine. Just... keep in mind our customers have Bing-On switched on basically always, so that all content delivered to them is under 1.5 Mbps ~480p. If your company can't deal with that for technical reasons, you must OPT-IN to OPT-OUT, per se. That is, we need to identify and monitor your content (ie. stop using https) so we know not to throttle the content when our customers are using Binge-On (aka all our customers, always).
-------------------------
[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/content/dam/tmo/en-g/pdf/BingeOn-Vi...
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. ;)
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
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.
>
> [1] Chick-Fil-A .. if you didn't get that one
CFA stopped funding all the super-militant anti-LGBT groups years ago. Huffington Post featured a story [1] about the CFA founder, Dan Cathy, becoming friends with prominent gay rights activist Shane Windmeyer, and some of the subsequent changes in how the organization handles things.
Unless you were referring to some other nefarious/sinister business aspect of which I am unaware? (Totally possible; I don't follow them terribly closely.)
[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/shane-l-windmeyer/dan-cathy-c...
I felt this wasn't emphasized enough.
1) The difference in cholesterol bandwidth is paid for by who is sponsoring this chicken sandwich. 2) Same, but colder. And waaaay late. Too bad their preferential sandwich is not sponsored to be in the "fast-lane" regardless of the subscribers plan. 3) Non-preferential content (ie. those who didn't pay off the ISP to fast-track their content) is at a competitive disadvantage.
As for 3, that seems kind of a stretch. I thought they did a half decent job, I don't think it does more harm than good for sure.
This is what everyone is missing. There is no "fast lane" and we need to stop acknowledging that phrase. There is only "your "the service you currently pay for" and "artificially slowed traffic".
From an advocacy and PR point of view, it's a very good piece that conveys the extreme case in which they are not able to switch ISP.
But that's not what net neutrality is about. Net neutrality is about netflix not being able to take more bandwidth than other streaming services. Net neutrality is fundamentally about producers and consumers sharing a path between them, with that path being neutral towards producers.
The burger king analogy pushes the costs of having a faster path to the consumer. In the case of net neutrality, the producers would be able to pay more to take more of the bandwidth. This wouldn't negatively affect consumers financially, but would affect the quality of service of other consumers.
It's important to get the distinction right because the consumers wouldn't be affected like the video portrays. They would simply get burgers at burger king faster, but much slower at mcdonalds. They wouldn't understand why mcdonalds isn't able to produce burgers faster, and they wouldn't be able to pay to get faster mcdonalds burgers. They would simply go to burger king.
Same with Netflix, they could pay all of the tolls with all the of the ISPs, but do you really think they wont push that cost onto the user?
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...
[2] http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/
[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/restaurants-that-serve-coke-v...
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.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/01/why-o...
The statement that fast food be cheap and thus essential to "working class people" is utter nonsense, so I guess it is ironic.
A "public food utility" in the US is actually a really great idea that should happen, similar to how public drinking water utilities in the US exist.
But way more similar to a large number of good intentions that resulted in mass starvation.
They are still allowed to only sell Coca-Cola, but exclusive deals are viewed as an anti-consumer mechanism.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
I'm a strong believer of "If you don't vote, you can't bitch" :)
No taxation without representation.