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Hungary To Tax Internet Traffic
An anonymous reader writes: The Hungarian government has announced a new tax on internet traffic: 150 HUF ($0.62 USD) per gigabyte. In Hungary, a monthly internet subscription costs around 4,000-10,000 HUF ($17-$41), so it could really put a constraint on different service providers, especially for streaming media. This kind of tax could set back the country's technological development by some 20 years — to the pre-internet age. As a side note, the Hungarian government's budget is running at a serious deficit. The internet tax is officially expected to bring in about 20 billion HUF in income, though a quick look at the BIX (Budapest Internet Exchange) and a bit of math suggests a better estimate of the income would probably be an order of magnitude higher.
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -- Ronald Reagan
Isn't the Internet already taxed? Not sure about Hungary, but most places you're taxed for the computer you buy, and for Internet service you get from a provider. The provider is likely taxed for the copper/fiber, taxed for the employees they have, the equipment they purchase. Electricity, real estate, etc related to this endeavor. That's all taxed. Sounds like a desperate government out of ideas.
0.02 what? Let's hope Hungarian ISPs can do math better than Verizon!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You're talking over half a buck ($0.62) per gigabyte.
Think about this in terms of AT&T's DSL service. Where you're capped at 150GB (and it's ridiculously easy to exceed).
That's an additional $93 over and above the cost of the connection itself! The ISPs are currently selling connections for $20-40 a pop.
How, EXACTLY, are ISPs supposed to simply absorb these costs?
The correct answer is "they aren't".
So the additional costs are going to get kicked onto the end-user's bill.
Now imagine your $20 a month internet services suddenly becoming a $110 a month internet service.
This is a way to encourage people to NEVER use their internet service.
It's the sort of thing that can cripple the entire industry in that country.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
My question is why a $0.62 USD tax on 1GB when a $1/month of 1mb/s can transfer 300GB? $186 of tax on $1 of service. That's a 18600% tax.
That's the most shocking thing, to me, about this proposal. It's a HUGE potential cost. It would make 'modern' web pages, with their kilobytes (or megabytes) of never-executed, embedded javascript, massive stylesheets, fancy images, and ads-ads-ads, extremely expensive. I would expect every Hungarian to immediately cancel any streaming service and to turn off "Auto load images" and "precache links." I would expect that Hungarian web sites would return to 1990's style terse HTML. That could be a good way to drastically reduce bandwith use in any country that implemented it and dramatically increase the pressure on ISPs to upgrade their networks.
Of course, applying it to the ISPs, rather than to the users, means that none of the bandwidth-conservation pressure will be applied to the people actually capable of affecting consumption, so it's likely to have no effect whatsoever. Except, maybe, to force all of the ISPs into bankruptcy
Looks like "The power to tax is the power to destroy" is going to be demonstrated once again.
If Hungary the want's to jump back into the stone age, so be it. P.S. This is just Draft legislation.. If the proposal is made into law, I see Google, Yahoo, and every major ISP abandoning that country in short order. Same goes for any web hosting providers. Backbone providers will route their traffic around that tiny country. I expect the transition to be relatively dramatic.
One can only hope the voters recall their conservative stone age representatives and put in socialists in charge, with an eye to the future. I can also see the EU court stepping in an declaring this tax to be invalid/moot as a violation of human rights.
...and as it starts spewing Gb after Gb of spam, you are now bankrupt. Nice. Or if you have a server in the country and fall victim to a DOS attack, you must now pay for the Tb of data exchanged in the DOS and must sell your firstborn to pay the tax.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Ahh, yes.
Government imposes a tax of ~$180 per user but forbids companies from actually having being able to bring in $180 per user per month.
That oughtta work well.