Hold the pickles, hold the..............................................

January 24, 2018 4:23 PM

Having trouble grasping net neutrality? It is a complex subject, as we have already discussed (previously x 49). Well, fear not: Burger King, of all places, explains it. (SLAdWeek)
posted by ricochet biscuit (24 comments total)

There’s a dose of “Whopper Freakout” in here, and you get the sense that the stunt could easily have turned violent—thankfully, it didn’t.

Well, that's because they didn't try this at a DMV or Driver's License office.
posted by Groundhog Week at 4:46 PM on January 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

The few links I'd seen previously used the abridged headline "Burger King Deviously Explains Net Neutrality" which made it seem as if BK was trying to deceive people about what net neutrality entails, rather than using chicanery to actually explain it in good faith, which is what really happened.

So, good on Burger King and bad on misleading link descriptions!
posted by Atom Eyes at 4:54 PM on January 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

Burger analogies: Slightly less wrong than car analogies.
posted by Talez at 4:55 PM on January 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

I mean the tiers they have are basically speed tiers now. If you were to apply anti-net neutrality to a burger place the cheeseburger could pay Burger King to always be made for the customer first. There could be hundreds of whoppers in the queue waiting but the cheeseburger has paid so it can skip it and therefore customers would order cheeseburgers more instead of waiting for a whopper.
posted by Talez at 5:07 PM on January 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

So what's the "WIFI ONLY $6.33" sign supposed to be about?
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:09 PM on January 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

I just saw this and thought it was great.
posted by Toddles at 5:54 PM on January 24, 2018 [4 favorites]

Another analogy might be:

Telcos already limit your cup size per month. It costs more to have a bigger cup. Now, they can also limit how fast you can fill that cup!

Throttle on!
posted by CrowGoat at 5:58 PM on January 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

My trumpista friend loves Steam, and because of some tribalistic mentality hates Origin, so I explained it thus:

'Imagine every few Scaramucci's, a new Call of Duty game comes out and Steam runs like mud, because everyone on Origin is downloading it'.

'Those bastards!' he says.

'Well EA can just give your ISP a big sack of cash to make sure Origin users can get their stuff first, thanks to Trump'.

I'm wearing him down slowly. Sessions cracking down on pot was a huge blow to his faith.
posted by adept256 at 5:59 PM on January 24, 2018 [26 favorites]

adept256 has the best explanation. The problem with explaining net neutrality is that it is about the interaction of three parties: content providers, ISPs, and consumers. Burger King's bit shows the silliness of caps when excess capacity is available, and gets across that fairness is what is at issue, but the fidelity of the explanation is lessened a bit by only showing the interaction of two players.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 6:53 PM on January 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

But if I order a bacon double cheeseburger, do I get it at full speed without paying extra?
posted by ckape at 7:05 PM on January 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

Ideally, the metaphor would be a mall food court, where you can order from various vendors and pay extra to the mall to get your food faster, and at the same time the vendors themselves are paying the mall to ensure their customers get preferential treatment, passing those costs off to their customers as they go.

So you really like Burger King burgers, but you settle for McDonalds because they're the only ones who can actually give you burgers fast enough to constitute a meal. You complain about it to your libertarian friend who just shrugs and says if the burger service really is that bad then someone will come along and build an entire second mall across the street with a better food court.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 7:39 PM on January 24, 2018 [13 favorites]

Dammit now I want a Whopper.
posted by Athanassiel at 8:45 PM on January 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

that article first mentions the anti-bullying ad that BK did back in October and i'd never heard about it and now i'm in too much tears to watch the net neutrality ad.
posted by numaner at 10:18 PM on January 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I watched that one first too. It's pretty powerful. My brain is still trying to reconcile Burger King with good social justice issue PSA.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:41 PM on January 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

A food court is a good metaphor, but not because of pricing or speed for actual customers.

Imagine a food court with two floors. Big established franchises like McDonalds and Burger King have worked out deals for the spaces on the ground floor. Small independent vendors can only afford spaces on the upper floor. A lot of diners aren't willing or able to climb stairs, but there is no elevator or escalator or even a ramp.

Anyone who wants to open a new restaurant there is now at a disadvantage: if they don't match the payola paid by the big guys, they have a harder time reaching their own customers.
posted by Phssthpok at 10:48 PM on January 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

I have a problem with this PSA. There is nothing ant-net neutrality about paying more and getting faster data. I pay a certain price for 20mbps and if I paid more I could get 100mbps and that's all cool. Netflix and Amazon pay a lot of money for high speed data connections and other companies may not have the money and pay less. That's all fine and nothing about this violates network neutrality. That's why I get upset when people talk about a fast lane. A 1GB connection is a fast lane. Fast lanes are cool.

Network neutrality says, essentially, that the speed with which you get the data should depend on the speed of your connection and the speed of the senders connection and should *not* have anything to do with the identity of the sender or the sorts of things they are sending. It's okay for me to get Amazon's video faster than Bob's Streaming Service if Amazon has a faster connection on their end. It's *not* okay if they both have the same sort connection and the person in the middle says "We like Amazon more, so they get priority".
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 10:48 PM on January 24, 2018 [6 favorites]

We could all pick holes in this I'm sure, but I'm not so sure I could come up with a better way of explaining the subject and still advertise BK, which they are surely constrained by.

The "third party" here is explicitly "mangagement", who want to promote chicken sandwiches at the expense of Whoppers and thus they are delivered faster even though the "bandwidth" at the counter is the same for both. Seems like a pretty good go at exposing the issues.
posted by merlynkline at 1:07 AM on January 25, 2018 [5 favorites]

Burger analogies: Slightly less wrong than car analogies.

YOU WOULDN'T
DOWNLOAD A BURGER
posted by straight at 1:23 AM on January 25, 2018 [9 favorites]

> Athanassiel:
"Dammit now I want a Whopper."

You aren't the only one. How about I slip you a fiver to get two of the cheap ones and you can wait in line?
posted by Samizdata at 2:03 AM on January 25, 2018

> It's Never Lurgi:
"I have a problem with this PSA. There is nothing ant-net neutrality about paying more and getting faster data. I pay a certain price for 20mbps and if I paid more I could get 100mbps and that's all cool. Netflix and Amazon pay a lot of money for high speed data connections and other companies may not have the money and pay less. That's all fine and nothing about this violates network neutrality. That's why I get upset when people talk about a fast lane. A 1GB connection is a fast lane. Fast lanes are cool.

Network neutrality says, essentially, that the speed with which you get the data should depend on the speed of your connection and the speed of the senders connection and should *not* have anything to do with the identity of the sender or the sorts of things they are sending. It's okay for me to get Amazon's video faster than Bob's Streaming Service if Amazon has a faster connection on their end. It's *not* okay if they both have the same sort connection and the person in the middle says "We like Amazon more, so they get priority"."

I can ONLY get 3Mbps. When AT&T tried giving me a "good customer" cookie, by bumping me to 5 at no charge, it didn't work. Too far from the CO. When Comcast tried jacking prices up during the annual contract renegotiation, they jacked the prices up so high, my landlords told them to hit the bricks, so that's not even an option.
posted by Samizdata at 2:05 AM on January 25, 2018

So basically money = power. Is this interpretation correct? Is there will to question this (unfortunate) equation?
posted by Laotic at 2:45 AM on January 25, 2018

So basically money = power. Is this interpretation correct? Is there will to question this (unfortunate) equation?

Depends - how many lobbyists are on your payroll?
posted by dazed_one at 9:04 AM on January 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Burger King's really been doubling down on that white bro reddit demo for the last... decade now, huh
posted by runt at 9:34 AM on January 25, 2018

YOU WOULDN'T
DOWNLOAD A BURGER

You would if you had a 3D printer...
posted by Merlin The Happy Pig at 6:00 PM on January 25, 2018