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?"

Comments

Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[SigILL]

The responsible minister already said "no" (Dutch language article and I'm too lazy to translate; learn Dutch you slackers :)).

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[dtml-try MyNick]

"Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times"

Actually, I'm shocked. News on Slashdot that is less then 24 hrs old.
What went wrong?

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Could be worse.
The news papers will only report about this tomorrow.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[SigILL]

Nederlands is lelijk hoor. [Dutch is ugly]

Come one, you gotta like a language in which "angstschreeuw" and "slechtstschrijvend" are perfectly valid words. It's like Perl (only less regular)! :)

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Traa]

Come one, you gotta like a language in which "angstschreeuw" and "slechtstschrijvend" are perfectly valid words. It's like Perl (only less regular)! :)

angstscreeuw = fear scream (one word in Dutch) = 8 consonants in a row
slechtstscrijvend = worst written (one word in Dutch) = 9 consonants in a row

some more fun examples from the Dutch language:
koeieuier = Cow's udder = 7 vowels in a row
Jazzzinger = Jazz Singer = 3 z's in a row

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[MRe_nl]

that's because it's spelled "angstschreeuw"
and "slechtstschrijvend", but the "h"seems to have dropped out of both words in his post.

koeienuier?
Jazzzanger or jazzzangeres, maar jazzzinger? it just doen't klink right;).

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[xonen]

"koeieuier"

According to new (1996) spelling this is supposed to be 'koeienuier'.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

Daily Show Special Report

Jason Jones: Tell me a joke.
New York Times manager: No, that's your job.
JJ: You wanna hear one from me? Okay. What's black and white and red all over?
NYT: A newspaper.
JJ: No, your balance sheet.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[mcvos]

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.)

Lobbyists

[MathFox]

Actually it is a report from the newspaper lobby and the responsible minister has already spoken out against the proposal.

Re:Lobbyists

[Godefricus]

No it is not. It is a report from a formal and powerful committee from within the parliament (Commissie Brinkman.) The minister did make an informal comment - thankfully - against this proposal shortly after receiving the report, but we have yet to await his final decisions -- and that of his civil servants et al. This could well be a matter of months.

Why link it to online?

[Fuseboy]

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? :-)

Re:Why link it to online?

[Znork]

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.

Re:Why link it to online?

[jcr]

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

Re:Why link it to online?

[johannesg]

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.

Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[erroneus]

What other newer technologies support older ones I have to wonder? I won't say that print media is "out" because I think it is still a very important thing to maintain. 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. With digital, there is a risk that few people take into account -- archives and editing. Anything stored digitally can be altered, often without a trace. History of events can be changed to suit whatever interests are pushing their agenda. The best you can do with print is burn it and hope that no one questions why it's missing.

But to tax one medium to support another? There is something wrong with that.

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[twidarkling]

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!

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[Locke2005]

Anything stored digitally can be altered, often without a trace. Ever heard of the Wayback machine? If information is made available for free, and massively redundant copies are made of it, then revisionism is very easy to detect by doing diffs against the copies. You can only run a Ministry of Truth if you control ALL the copies of the information.

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[portnux]

What a cool idea! Maybe before that they can tax sneaker companies to support their wooden shoe industry though!

Explosion in the irony factory...

[mooingyak]

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.'

It's a shame those newspapers don't have any means of getting this kind of information out to the public.

Re:Explosion in the irony factory...

[clarkkent09]

It's a shame those newspapers don't have any means of getting this kind of information out to the public.

Well that's kind of the point, nobody's reading them.

Re:Explosion in the irony factory...

[Endo13]

Also, that "Whoosh" sound you heard was neither superman nor an airplane.

Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

In half the 2 paper towns these days, both papers are owned by the same goddamn company!

I think multiple competing news sources are a good thing, but I also think, in this country, that the ability to sort and judge good information from bad information is a skill that we are intentionally not teaching our children. On top of that, we are rewarding news sources (Faux News, I'm looking at you) for providing biased and substandard coverage.

That being the case, I'd really prefer to see one decent source rather than a half dozen crap sources.

Re:Bad idea.

[chebucto]

Newspapers living on the gravy train? Pissing away money? That's news to me; I know some journalists and they get paid at the low end of the professional wage spectrum.

Few independent newspapers left? Overpaid CEOs? This is probably accurate, but it doesn't follow that a newspaper bailout is just about the industry; the individual papers remain, and still serve a purpose, whether or not they're part of a empire at the moment.

Oh, and the CEOs didn't come up with the idea that free content was the solution; they were forced into that. Most newspapers started out charging for their content, and many still do - if not for their current stuff, at least for their archives. The NYT's decision to make all current content free was itself news only a year or two ago.

The only legitimate purpose of a paper is to keep watch on the government? That's absurd.

The industry may be changing, evolving, or even growing a sixth finger, but it doesn't follow that the ads-classifides-susbcriber-box business model will fail. I don't know anyone who _prefers_ to read from an LCD over dead-tree. More than that, news simply does not have to be up-to-the-minute; 99% of the stuff in a paper is fine when its 12 hours old, and some things - like columns - are better after bit of reflection.

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

When we started looking for cost cutting measures, we discovered we'd been paying 250,000 a year for phones at a distribution center we'd closed 5 years prior. Nobody'd noticed, because that was pocket change. That's a whole buncha reporters they could have been paying, and that sort of waste was endemic just a few decades ago.

And forced? I don't think so. They ignored the internet, and tried to charge regular subscription prices for online content, and took it in the ass. Then they went too far the other way. They're still lunging around without a real direction, outsourcing ads cutting their own throats by putting up projects that take months to produce, online before the print product is even on the stands.

They try to sell these "online editions" which are basically pdf versions of the paper, and much less useful than the website itself. What a joke.

Classifieds? Classifieds are gone. The revenue is down to 10% of what it used to be, and it's never coming back. Free online classifieds are superior to 15 columns of unsearchable text so small you need a fricking magnifying glass.

No one gives a damn if the crappy newspaper comics page is going to go out of business. No one cares if the extremely scanty gig guide or the cooking/gardening crap that's all available online is gone. Editorial content, somewhat, but that's on the fringe of the regular news content.

Frankly, you sound like you're about 60, and more power to you, you're our core demographic. But trust me when I tell you, that we can't survive if we can't get some subscribers under 30, and they're rare as rare.

Re:Bad idea.

[demachina]

"This whole "the print media industry needs government help!" crap is making me nuts."

Well I would tend to agree subsidizing the mostly corporatized newspaper empires is a little nuts.

On the other hand I would REALLY like for someone to figure out a way for journalism to be a viable career, and to insure there are substantial numbers of professional investigative journalists digging up stories in the world precisely because it make people sweat who don't wan those stories dug up. They should absolutely all stopping killing trees to print their news, put it all online, and make sure there is a good way to make it available to commuters, but they also need to get paid and right putting it on line for free mostly means they don't make anything because Google is the only one making money on online ads it seems.

I love online news sites, I appreciate what they do, but I like everyone else am too cheap to pay them if I can get their stuff for free. If I can't get their stuff for free I wont go to their site. Google in particular is the one making huge amount of money exploiting all their news gathering and should be figuring out a way to share some of their wealth to keep deserving professional journalists employed, and ideally lettting all the hacks and newspaper execs starve.

It is true there have been massive failures on the part of professional journalists, like Judith Miller and her propaganda campaign for the Bush administration on WMD's used to perpetrate the war in Iraq. Oh hell.... professional journalists failed en masse during the first six years of the Bush regime. But I blame that mostly on 9/11 and an American public that got seduced in to picking flag waving over truth and the press pandered to what the people wanted. Same thing happened after Pearl Harbor and "Remeber the Maine" in 1898.

Its also true the current corporate empires that own most media outlets and employ most professional journalist are scum, like most greedy executives, and are causing many of the problems as you suggest.

But.... I also don't want to see a world where what passes for journalism degenerates in to a bunch of bloggers sitting around regurgitating the crap they found surfing the web, mixed with a heavy dose of opinion and rumor.......... kind of like I'm doing here. I would actually like to see a restoration of investigative journalists who go out and actually dig up the truth, make people uncomfortable who deserve to be uncomfortable, and put it on the web instead of on dead tress.

They should get paid for it, and if they are good at it get paid well.

Re:Bad idea.

[Nefarious Wheel]

On the other hand I would REALLY like for someone to figure out a way for journalism to be a viable career...

Ok, blowing all my mods to address this one.

In the company I work for, we use trained journalists, and we use them for one purpose - and it's not writing internal newsletters. We use them because they know how to write. We have a constant need for people to write about stuff we sell and do in order to inform our potential customers. That text needs to be engaging, with correct syntax, punctuation and spelling. Do you know how rare it is in even a large technology company to find people who know how to construct a paragraph correctly, to say nothing of making it readable?

Mind you, they need to know a little about technology. Not a huge amount, but enough to ask sensible questions in an interview.

You might end up being called a "market analyst" rather than a "reporter", but work is definitely there, and it's the same sort of investigative reporting you were trained for. But the pay is probably better and interviews are easier to come by. It may not be the discovery of Watergate, but there's hope for you that isn't spelled Wendy's.

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

Free papers are an exception to the rule: they really are supported almost entirely by ad revenue, so they can afford to give away personal ads or classifieds just to draw the extra eyes for their paid ads. They don't own their own presses, they usually don't do home delivery, and they tend to have a very small staff, so their costs are very low.

On the other hand, they make very little money, and generally can't afford to do much in-depth journalism.

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

Is it? Is it really? What town do you live in that the internet really gives a shit about your city council? New York City?

Almost all print news coverage on the internet comes originally from old school newspapers. So, yea, it's great for news...Right now. When those papers go bankrupt, it's going to suck.

The one place where internet coverage really really sucks is local coverage. Newspapers completely dominate that niche, even now. That's why small town newspapers are so pervasive: that news isn't available anywhere else, and even a weekly paper has far more actual content than the pathetic little 30 minute news spots the tv stations do...In my experience, the TV and radio stations tend to lift everything from the newspapers anyway (which is getting easier, now that the papers are putting things online so quickly.)

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

Blogs are not the answer. Everyone says, "They'll all go start blogs!" and it makes me want to shake them until the stupid stops.

How many blogs actually make money? Now take all the ones that only do shock and schlock. Yea. I can't think of any either.

Journalism is a professional career. They go to school to learn to do all this crap, and then they go out and practically apply that knowledge. Some of it they do because they love it, but in the end, they're looking for a paycheck and health insurance.

Worse, in-depth stuff can take weeks and months (and, very occasionally years) to research. Who pays their salary during that time? How do their kids eat?

When they do break the next huge amazing story after 6 months of digging through public records on their own dime, how do they get compensated for their time? You going to buy a t-shirt?

Real journalism takes money. This wasn't traditionally a problem, because people were generally willing to fork a modest fee for reliable information. But now the internets have come and saved everyone from the burden of being able to make a living by generating information.

In my experience, journalists are a bit like lawyers. They all want to do the right thing when they're getting started, want to fight for truth, and expose corruption. But eventually, they get beaten down by people who think they're always lying, always dishonest...People who give a quote, and then sue because they end up looking bad.

And after enough of that, they say, "Fuck this low paying shit, I'm going to put this knowledge and experience to work for money." And then they go work for a politician, or a corporation, or a lobbying firm.

So don't worry about the journalists. They'll get paid.

Newspapers. Blogs. Forgetting something?

[nausea_malvarma]

Yet again, the Dutch government entirely ignores the welfare of town criers. This is an insult to town criers everywhere! I demand that the dutch government fund the struggling town crier industry by taxing newspaper sales.

The news ain't free, you know.

Stupid

[gilesjuk]

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.

Re:Stupid

[SatanicPuppy]

Bad analogy, because the death of reel to reel wasn't the death of (for example) symphonic music. It was just a transition from one format to another.

The problem with the possible death of the print media industry, is that they're the only ones who do real, in-depth, reliable, reporting these days...They're the only ones who can afford to, because it's fricking expensive to do it right. So far, it's too expensive to support with online ad revenue as well, hence the problem.

TV doesn't give a damn: they can fill the same amount of time by giving air time for some fringe moron to sit and spout his own uninformed opinions. And they hardly ever own up to errors of fact in their broadcasts. Can't rely on them for anything but pretty pictures.

Bloggers don't have any real money, and they are completely compromised by a 100% dependence on ad revenue. Newspapers have always cared about ad revenue, but subscriber revenue and numbers were important enough to allow larger papers to effectively ignore the complaints of their advertisers...What were they going to do? Print pamphlets?

Some people think the loss of that in depth reporting is a bad thing. It's going to be worst in local markets: when was the last time you saw your local TV station cover a city council meeting? If someone is zoning the land across the street from your house for heavy industry, you'd probably like to know, but chances are you won't find out about it without newspaper coverage.

Summer School Homework

[DirtyCanuck]

Excerpt from a work in progress assignment for my summer university course:

Early conjecture on the future of Newspapers and print media foretold of a future of embraced digital publications. Early literature on this movement includes Digitizing the News (Boczkowski, 2005) which begins by tracing early consumer non-print publishing initiatives to the rise of the internet in the mid 1990s. The books examination shifts to reviews of various online content provided by newspapers in the second half of the 1990s, which varies from direct reproduction of printed newspapers to interactive web based content that complimented the printed news. The book then progresses into examining three specific accounts of newspaper adaptation of the internet. The first example is a Technology section of the New York Times which started as an experiment to test new grounds for online media. The second example is the Virtual Voyager project of the HoustonCronicles.com (Boczkowski, 2005) of which reporters pioneered the evolution of multimedia journalism. The third example provided is the Community connection initiative of New Jersey Online (Boczkowski, 2005) which chronicles the birth of user generated content. This literature came out at around the same time as The Vanishing News Paper by Philip Meyer, which makes various assumptions of the state of Newspapers in the mid 2000â(TM)s and the way they are headed. The book begins with reprisal of early work Meyer did on newspapers being âoein the influence businessâ (Meyer, 2005) rather then the news and information business. His 2nd chapter focuses on the business model of âoeHow Newspapers Make Moneyâ (Meyer, 2005) which focuses on how newspapers are âoevictims of easy money.â (Meyer, 2005). In the 11th chapter, after outlining issues surrounding current models Meyer suggests that the death of Newspapers is near. In this chapter he essentially digs the grave for newspapers and predicts the death of newspapers if action is not taken. In Meyers final chapter he says âoeThe time has come to think about the things that we on the ground can do while traditional news media struggle for survival.â (Meyer, 2005) Giving various solutions to the current track that printed newspapers are on.
These two books show early attitudes that are rather contrasting. While Boczkowski is conscious of the evolution of newspapers and migration to digital media he is still optimistic. His book is more of a glorification of progress rather than a cautionary tale. Meyerâ(TM)s on the other hand is very aware of the inevitability of newspapers if they do not undergo drastic change. These books thus give a capsule for attitudes in the mid 2000â(TM)s with regards to newspapers. One attitude was optimistic and the other a prerequisite of upcoming doom. Which book was more accurate? Only time would tell.

The Contemporary Complexion
At this point it is very clear as to who was right and who was wrong with regards to previously reviewed literature. The sense of urgency illustrated by Madigan and Meyer could have never had so much relevance. With the demise of the economy we see an acceleration of the death of newspaper that nobody predicted. Currently we see some Journals contradicting previous assumptions. Such is the case with The Rebirth of News (Peters, 2009) written in the Spring of 2009 this article in the Economist completely changes its tone from the previously reviewed article. In 2006 the Economist said âoeA cause for concern, but not for panicâ (Martin, 2006) but only 2.5 years later we see mass panic. The latest article stating that âoeMost industries are suffering at present, but few are doing as badly as the news business.â (Peters, 2009) This revelation comes at a time when newspapers are dropping at almost a daily rate. The article goes on the suggest reasons for the demise, including loss of ad revenue and readership. The article however informative still does not address the problems outli

Dutch government just propsed another law...

[VinylRecords]

...this time all sales of CDs will go towards the 8-track tape industry and sales of DVDs and BDs will go to VHS and Laser Disc companies.

This is bullshit

[eln]

This is bullshit!

Or, for our Dutch friends, a Google translation:

Dit is onzin!

And then back to English:

This is nonsense!

And, just for fun, to Filipino:

ito ay kalokohan!

And back to English:

This is poppycock!

I think I've made my point.

I don't want to pay twice

[Rashdot]

I'm already paying for my morning newspaper, why would I need to pay for it again via an ISP tax?

Uh, no.

[dwiget001]

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.

Dutch Gov. Wants To Tax Online Media To Fund Print

[TW Burger]

This is like taxing marriage to fund prostitution.

How about a tax on the word "fuck" . . . ?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I Water is taxed about 6 times if you count 'em all (at least the rate is 6% after drinking water, what a fucking great silver lining that is).

Well, fuck me over flying fucking backwards. The fucking Netherlands has fucking taxes on fucking water? I fucking thought that if the fucking country didn't have all those fucking brilliant fucking dikes, then the whole fucking country would be under fucking water, and they would be fucking totally fucking fucked over, with no fucking clue what to do with all the fucking water.

Except fucking tax it.

But what the fuck do I know?

And fuck, that fucking story about that fucking Dutch boy, who saved the fucking country, by sticking his fucking finger in the fucking dike to stop the fucking leak?

Well, the little fucking bastard was just fucking trying to finger fuck the fucking dike.

Please mention me in your prayers, before you go to sleep tonight . . . I don't want to go to work tomorrow, and start talking like my rant, above.

Re:How about a tax on the word "fuck" . . . ?

[imakemusic]

WTF?! Gordon Ramsey's on slashdot?

/. is wrong here, but whats really scary...

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't something from the Dutch government, but from a commision ("Commision Brinkman") who has given out an advice to the government. So in that aspect /. is not only behind the facts as others already wrote; they got it wrong too.

Second: The person behind this suggestion ("Eelco Brinkman") is one of the more powerful people in the Netherlands. If someone like that comes up with a brain dead idea like this then I call that a very scary development. The government rejected the idea, but not merely out of their own free will. Right now the Dutch governments popularity is near an all time low, and they're trying to do everything they can not to cause any up stirs. Until after the elections anyway.

Now our government has rejected the idea, and its my belief that the uproar caused by this insane plan was the major factor behind it. But what if the elections and the popularity weren't at rock bottom right now? They're clueless enough to push something like this through; especially when one of the results will be more income (taxes) for the government.

A very, very, scary thought IMO. And yes, I'm from Holland.

Re:The amazon thanks

[afabbro]

The Amazon thanks

They planted spruce, fir, and pine in the Amazon rainforest?

Re:For fuck's sake!

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Fuck the Dutch and their fucking tax attitudes, though.

Nigel Powers, is that you?

Wrong headline and summary

[Otis_INF]

The Dutch government didn't state it wants any of this thing. The minister of education and culture asked a committee (with non parliament members!) how newspapers could be supported so they don't go bankrupt but at the same time the government isn't messing with how the papers run their company. He has 8 million euros for that. The committee calculated that that's not enough and advised to tax internet usage a bit so the total sum is larger.

That's it. It's an advice of a committee to a minister who then has to think about what to do with it. As the minister is a well known scientist and well aware of what internet etc. is, I don't think this advice will be made law.