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.
BT still owns the all the backbone connectivity and makes obscene profits on it. Taxing users in order to make more connections to that backbone monopoly is totally wrong.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
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
Instead of the gov' taxing people and placing down public broadband lines companies can compete over... They're literally handing a giant check to the existing two big broadband network suppliers (cable and DSL) and asking them to put down the lines. So in the long term they're just giving the broadband networks a larger subscriber base without any real public benefit.
There is nothing wrong with the tax but what they're using it for is flawed. It will lead to monopolies in most areas, or at best two options to pick from that both charge similar rates and provide similar services.
Problem is BT estimates that it will cost upwards of £5Bn to do FttC.At 50p a month even if every household paid this. It would still take 37.9 years to raise that amount. Its totally pointless, further more the problem in the UK is that all the politicans and BPI seem to have gotten it in their heads that all file-sharing is illegal regardless of whether it is family videos or the latest cinema release.
I'm sure I recall something about US phone companies being given vast quantities of money - officially to lay on broadband, but there were no sanctions written in to say "failure to lay on broadband will result in the money being repayable" or similar.
Quite what happened with the money I don't know but it wasn't spent on broadband.
This actually *is* a good thing - if the money inmediately is used for the intended purpose: Bringing nation-wide Broadband fast. Which would mean that the runtime of this tax is limited to a few years, when every corner of the countryside has broadband.
This is actually quite different from the German GEZ fee for Internet capable devices. Which is bizar beyond anything concievable.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
>The Government says it will make it "easier and cheaper" for rights holders to take civil action against file sharers.
>
>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."
>
>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
Other major points in the report (from this BBC article):
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
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?
And they charge based on bits transferred, not bits able to be transferred. Meaning that the most economical way of selling broadband is to oversubscribe and blame other users on the slow connection.
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.
According to the article, the government is going to be getting the ISPs to do their dirty work for them, whatever we have as an RIAA/MPAA equivalent, and the police:
Sounds like they're making the ISPs track down the sharers so that the rights holders can just cherry-pick from a list. Sounds like a bad situation for the ISPs to get in to with things like "common carrier" statuses.
Again, looks like the ISPs aren't just going to be "carriers" any more. Could be quite a bad precedent (for the ISPs, at least). Also, what's the betting that a) the protocol blocks will be a blanket ban on BitTorrent, meaning that legitimate downloads (like Linux ISOs) will also be affected and b) they'll do it in such a way that's easily circumventable?
"A third possibility might be that the last mile infrastructure is communally owned"
... then come back again and again taking ever more money every few years. Each time taking millions more to pay for incremental upgrades.
... while "Ian Livingston, the chief executive, stands to make more than £6 million in bonuses this year if performance targets are met. This is on top of his basic salary of £850,000." ... Its a corrupt arragant UK government giving millions more to an arragant corrupt boss treating his staff with contempt.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/telecoms/article5890128.ece
A fourth possibility is they pay for it out of the cost to the people who need better connections outside of the major cities.
Getting others to pay for it is nuts. Also where does this thinking end? Can the government simply choose ever more ways to tax people to give to yet more companies to partially fund what the company should be earning from the sale of its products.
Also they are selling a rubbish product. 2Mbits is obsolite now. So do they then come back in a few years time, to take even more money to pay to upgrade it to say 8Mbits
What is it with the current UK government. Their greedy corrupt control freak attitude seems to have no end. I love how they spin it as (implied *just*) 50p-per-month levy. That sounds so much better than £6 (about $10) extra tax per year. The UK Government gives hundreds of billions to their rich banker friends and then their friends in telecoms also want some free extra money, so the Government decides to take some more money from people. Haven't they given enough already this year?!?. £6 may not be much when you have a job, but its a lot for the elderly on a pension. Also if someone walked up to you in the street and just tried to take that amount of money off you, everyone would complain about it, yet this government can just decide to take it wherever they wish.
Its not as if BT are short of money... "BT to freeze pay of 100,000 employees"
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Oh yeah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund
The goals of Universal Service are:
To promote the availability of quality services at just, reasonable, and affordable rates,
To increase access to advanced telecommunications services throughout the Nation,
To advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas.
We saw where that went.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
"how can we trust these idiots to actually spend the money on what they're levying the tax for?"
You can't and they won't. Just like road tax goes into the general pot so will this. Its just another way for our failed government to raise taxes.
Since theres now going to be a tax for the underclass and people who are too tight to pay for broadband themselves shall we assume there'll also need to be a tax for these people to be given computers to use on said service?
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.
Just yeterday NPR had a bit about some kind of tax in Britain called "the license fee" that runs for about 200$ a year for every TV set owned by the Brits. And the money apparently goes to fund BBC. Once you pay 15$ a month to get Brit version of PBS, why not 50$ for all of the internet at full speed?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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 :-)
I really do not like the way that most news outlets say that "file sharing" is illegal. It's not. Sharing *copyrighted* files is but in itself, the act of sharing isn't. The distinction is an an important one as producers of open source and even some musicians use sharing to their advantage, but it seems to be getting increasingly lost in the noise.
The danger is that the credibility of these new models will be eroded over time with the repetition of the general concept that sharing is wrong.
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.