It annoys me that governments in many countries charge you an involuntary license fee for public service TV, whether you actually watch it or not. This might have been a good idea many decades ago, when the infrastructure for TV broadcasting needed to be built up. But these days, when public TV largely duplicates programming provided by private channels, which are quite capable of producing and marketing high quality cultural offerings, it seems as archaic as subsidizing dying industries such as coal mining in Wales or Germany.
So you can imagine my reaction when I read this article in today’s Daily Mail:
Search engines, download giants and broadband users could face levies as ministers seek to fund public service TV and the roll-out of broadband…
…Insiders say that the tax on search engines would be the most politcally ‘tenable’ of the three ideas as it would less directly hit consumers in the pocket.
It is suggested as well as Google and Yahoo, a search engine tax could also be extended to things like YouTube, which people use to find information…
Yes – if anything is successful, tax it to subsidize services which are no longer relevant or which are not able to compete with commercial offerings. Why not allow them independence and the possibility to sink or swim like any private enterprise?
