Slashdot Mirror
UK Government Announces Broadband Tax
Barence writes "The UK Government is planning a 50p-per-month levy on fixed-line connections to pay for next-generation broadband. The Government claims that market forces alone will bring fiber connections to only two thirds of the country, so it plans to use the 'broadband tax' to pay for the final third by 2017. The plans form part of the Government's Digital Britain report, which also see the UK guarantee connections of 2Mbits/sec for every citizen by 2012." The report also threatens legal action and bandwidth restriction for repeat file sharers.
At 2Mb/s, I'd say the entire country gets punished right from the start. This sort of speed is okay, but it's hardly the future.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
>The Government says it will make it "easier and cheaper" for rights holders to take civil action against file sharers.
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>What's more, it will "place an obligation on ISPs to maintain records of the most frequent offenders, which would allow rights holders to take targeted legal action against these >infringers."
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>Finally, ISPs will be roped in to protect copyright material, restricting bandwidth to known filesharers, and even blocking access to certain protocols entirely.
ONLY approved protocols available - that's dictatorship, not government. Thank fuck that we'll be rid of the ruling party for a very long time (possibly for ever) after next June
This actually *is* a good thing - if the money inmediately is used for the intended purpose: Bringing nation-wide Broadband fast.
Unfortunately given the track record of our government, I can't say I'm hugely optimistic about that. This smells of the kind of private-public partnerships that our government is so fond of, where they can claim a low up-front cost for a scheme, but it ends up costing more than they thought, with the private companies raking it in at the tax payers expense. See for example the PFI hospital schemes that Mr Brown championed so keenly. I expect the telcos in line to be involved in this are rubbing their hands with glee.
Oh no... it's the future.
Surely the problem here isn't that the UK government is trying to raise taxes to pay for something that has a massive social benefit, but that it's doing it via a poll tax? I pay as much towards this project as my millionaire friend and my grandmother who's on a small pension. Is it really that unfashionable to tax the rich?
Well I'm not sure about the case with Virgin, who don't share their lines, but BT is obliged to, as the GP somewhat rudely said. So at least in terms of BT, who own all the non-cable last mile infrastructure in the country, it's not handing them alone a gift, although they will profit from it, it's also a gift to all the ADSL providers that use BT's infrastructure (at least the last mile), which is all of them.
Still, I'm not sure what a better solution is tbh, considering the current situation. A better contract at the time of privatisation would have been a solution, but that horse has bolted.
That 50p extra per month they want to charge me is exactly the 50p they gave me back a few months ago when they dropped the VAT on my £20 pcm broadband bill from £3 to £2.50. And now they want that back...
Oh wait, aren't they getting that back in December when they hike the VAT rate back up again? And that's assuming that it only goes back up to 17.5% rather than the 20% everyone's expecting... :(
New labour, new (stealth) taxes.
A quick glance at http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3994-the-digital-britain-report-is-finally-out.html will show what some think of this and http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ gives a wider view of ISP related moans with links to other ISPs information.
The rich shouldn't pay for my TV or my internet. To reiterate: I wouldn't benefit if this tax was levied progressively; I'd end up paying more, in all likelihood. That's fair, because I'm more able to pay such a tax than a lot of other people.
I'm confused as to why people always think that progressive taxes will take money out of their pay packets. Wealth distribution is massively skewed and any fair taxation system would tax the richest and leave the regular people alone.
They weren't granted ownership of anything, the government *sold* the infrastructure when they privitised British Telecom. Oh, and the government also paid Mercury Communications a not insignificant sum of money to put in a second national network during the 1980s - that network became Cable & Wireless, and thus Virgin Media. Tell me this - where is the requirement for Virgin Media to wholesale their lines?
Plus, BTs mandate only extends to universal service for phone systems and 14.4Kbit/sec capable lines. Stop moving the goal posts.
In France you can get 3.6MB/s satellite internet for 40 euro per month. So why would you pull cables? Only hardcore gamers will be in trouble, ping times of 600 ms are typical. But then, keep the gamers in the city please :-)
They can say what they want, but next year the Tories will win and scrap most of this plan.
The Tories are not in bed with telcos, credit-card manufacturers and "creative industries", they have different sponsors (oil companies, "old money", etc). The flow of pork will be redirected accordingly. This report is hardly worth the digital paper it is printed on.
-- Let's go Viridian.
"A brit version of PBS".
Hahaha.
Hahahahahaha.
God love PBS for persevering in your race to the intellectual bottom of a television market, but PBS is a pale shadow of the BBC, which we don't sneer at, don't find to be either elitist or overly populist and are enormously proud of.
The licence fee burns a bit, for sure, but the alternative is sponsorship, advertising, or endless subscription drives. The absence of adverts on major mainstream channels also limits their pervasiveness in the competition.
Live here for a while before you assume we are blindly and uneducatedly being taxed for little reason.
On your central point, I mostly agree, actually. I think the licence fee comparison is not wholly implausible, though I am rather less certain it will work as well.
How DARE other people use your internet!