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Dutch Gov. Wants To Tax Online Media To Fund Print
Godefricus writes "Outrage ensued among Dutch techie and media websites, after a government report advised that the dwindling print media industry should be financially supported by the online industry (Google translation; Dutch original here). The idea is to help the old media fund 'innovative initiatives.' The suggested implementation of the plan is by taxing a percentage of each ISP subscription, and give the money to the papers. The report, which was solicited by the Dutch parliament and written by a committee of its members, specifically states that 'news and the gathering of news stories is not free, and the public must be made aware of that.' The report is not conclusive, but from here it's just one step toward a legislative proposal. Both industries are largely privately owned in The Netherlands, and the current government is center-left wing. Who needs an RIAA if you can build one into your government? And hey, why invest in the future if you can invest in the past?"
Beginning Disclaimer: I work for a print newspaper.
This sounds like about the worst idea I've ever heard. We've been living on the gravy train for decades, and as a consequence, we piss away money like it's water. Now things have gotten tight, and we're cutting and cutting deep, and a lot of outlets may go under, but so be it.
This whole "the print media industry needs government help!" crap is making me nuts. First off, there are very few independent papers left, so you're really talking about bailing out another industry with overpaid CEOs who can't make a decent business decision to save their lives. The same people who really really thought the solution to their industrys internet problem was to give away their product for free. Right. Second, the news media has only one real legitmate function: to inform you about the actions the government is taking in your name. Having the government bail them out is a little bit problematic for that reason.
The industry is changing. It's evolving. It will become something else. Trying to persist the current model is bound to fail, and propping them up with public cash does nothing but compromise their mission and prevent them from figuring out how to accurately make their transition. Jesus, just look at GM if you want to know what public money does to a private company.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
After all, once a newspaper commits to print, it can't effectively be changed. It was said and published, for better or for worse, whatever it was it will always be.
Yep, after all, "Dewey Defeats Truman" will always be!
And hey, not like there's ever been forgeries of ancient documents. Got access to a printing press? Whip up your own version of history, and leave it some place safe to age, and hundreds of years from now, you'll mindfuck some archaeologists!
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Did people have to pay car tax to fund horses and carts when cars become mainstream?
Things change, old media dies. We don't listen to music on reel to reel tape recorders anymore, are people trying to preserve such things? nope.
So set up a taxpayer-supported news service ala BBC and CBC.
I admit that won't be without contention, but it's a much better idea that taxing ISP use to support newspapers for pete's sakes. This committee isn't even trying to get at the central issue, they're just trying to prop up a media form the public is abandoning.
I'm glad the minister has rejected it. Now they can get on with discussing how Dutch reporting will need to be supported in our modern reality.
Taxing ISPs specifically, seems ass-backwards.
Well, they want to blame someone, and the ISP's are probably as much 'internet' as you get.
why not fund it out of tax revenue generally
Because then it becomes part of the general budget and people start asking why we're spending that much on subsidies. Common strategy in the IP industries; if politicians actually had to justify the costs they'd be downsized in a heartbeat. Of course, calling it 'media production fee' and slapping it on the broadband, or calling it 'copyright' and letting private interests decide the rate doesn't really change the essence or the cost to the economy.
Still, when it comes to the news business, few seem to be willing to face the actual problem; news is vastly overproduced. There is simply so much material to read every day that nobody can read anywhere near even a fraction of very narrow fields of interest. The fact that it costs money to produce news simply isn't the problem; todays more concentrated world has made the readers time the scarce product, a problem that no subsidies will solve.
I'm already paying for my morning newspaper, why would I need to pay for it again via an ISP tax?
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Screw that.
If print media cannot survive on it's own, with it's own resources, etc. then too fricken bad.
It would be like, in the days of the first automobiles, taxing them to keep horse buggy manufacturers going. Actually, it's even worse than that.
The Amazon thanks
They planted spruce, fir, and pine in the Amazon rainforest?
Advice: on VPS providers
I know this goes against groupthink, but it may actually be a good thing, at least in the short-to-intermediate term. Online media comes in two distinct forms - firstly, as a branch of traditional media (eg, online newspapers), and secondly, as independent web-only reports (blogs). Now, the blogs are almost exclusively rehashes of traditional media - so if traditional media completely dies, what will the blogs do? That's why it's a good thing in the short-to-medium term to keep traditional media alive. And because traditional media is being harmed by "The Internet", some short-sighted bureaucrat or politician thought "hey, why not punish The Internet" (without realising that content providers /=/ ISPs /=/ "The Internet", or the inherent problems in regulatory CPR).
Long term is a completely different story. My personal belief of what would happen if traditional media collapsed would be one of two possibilities - either traditional media will manage to somehow survive in an online format (despite their content being mirrored by other blogs which may not have whatever inconvenience the traditional media's revenue model has), or blogs will actually implement the egalitarian idea of "many eyes" reporting (blogs reporting on their local scene, and all the interesting stories being scraped by other blogs). The first would mean that news reporting would be just as bad as it is now, but the second could go either way. Either the lack of QC in the original post will mean that the low quality will reverberate in every subsequent repost, OR, people will seek out high calibre scrapes, which will favour high quality original reports (not that quality and popularity are necessarily synonymous in news reporting). Thus a market-driven QC, and everyone's happy.
I know this goes against groupthink,
No, it goes against logic altogether.
Things change. Printing news on mass quantities of paper is on its way to becoming a museum hobby, and that's as it should be. The proposal at hand is to penalize a productive sector of the economy to keep people and resources misallocated. There are sentimental reasons for keeping newspapers around, but if it made economic sense to do so, they wouldn't be going belly-up.
I wonder if anyone proposed taxing kerosene to pay idle whalers when people gave up on whale-oil lamps?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The news papers will only report about this tomorrow.
Funny? Insighful! Every time I read a newspaper, I'm surprised I'm reading yesterday's news. I love reading from paper, but as a medium for reporting the latest news, it's obsolete. They should focus more on background and analysis for the factoids you've already read online. (Which is exactly the business model of my current newspaper, which is one of the few Dutch newspapers that's growing.)
Taxing ISPs specifically, seems ass-backwards. If you're going to subsidize an outdated industry (which, hey, is done all over the place) why not fund it out of tax revenue generally, rather than putting a brake specifically on the internet? How about a new tax on cigarettes? :-)
I have two more questions:
1. Every day, 3 or 4 completely free newspapers are being spread in every trainstation (and many other places) here in the Netherlands. If "news cannot be free", as the commission claims, does this mean we need to raise an extra public transportation tax to compensate for this free news as well?
2. If the newspapers are being hurt so badly by free news available on the internet, why do they put their own content on the internet? And given that this pain is apparently self-inflicted, why would everybody need to pay for it?
The claim that "news cannot be free" is bogus: news on the internet is paid for by advertising. It is hard to believe that a website such as nu.nl would exist for so long without any revenue. The existence of free newspapers furthermore proves that paid subscriptions are not a necessity for running a newspaper.
Also, the claim that quality journalism is a necessity for democracy is laughable. Well, actually it isn't - it's just that I see too many cut'n'paste jobs of ANP news in too many newspapers every day. This quality investigative journalism of which they speak seems to be a mythological ideal, rather than reality.