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.

Comments

Re: Nah, this is just stage 1

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:Nah, this is just stage 1

[BarbaraHudson]

You do realize that streaming video also includes online coursework, right?

You do realize that before streaming video that there were other ways to do coursework online, right? Streaming video is not an essential commodity, and if it becomes too expensive, people will go back to those other ways (both online and offline), which have never been shown to be inferior to streaming video.