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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.
1. How to accurately measure it?
2. If this is a tax on streaming video... why not just directly tax streaming video (more)?
3. If this must be done, have an X amount untaxed.
"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
So taxes "set back the country's technological development by some 20 years", and when it's the internet the Slashdot crowd agrees.
But if it's anything else, taxes are so great. "Pay your share!" Despite the fact that the government doing the taxing is just going to use those resources against you in the form of militarized police, warrantless wiretaps, and drone surveillance.
Mmmm, Internet tax!
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Or something essential was lost in translation.
How interesting, you're paying initially for the opportunity to use the internet at a cretain bandwidth and then actually paying for the content you're using. Sort of like paying the capital cost for the infrastructure and then paying for the usage. Like paying for the sewer pipes each month then paying for water. While this isn't ideal, I don't consider it a terrible way to look at things. Maybe if you had a reduced subscription so everything balanced out (though we all know that won't happen).
Hungary is, sadly, turning into authoritarian regime focused on maintaining the power of those at the top. Anything that feeds their spending habits is on the table, I'm sure. We should expect more news like that coming from Hungary :(
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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.
... looks like an attempt to restrict free speech from a little closer to Hungary. The current regime has serious totaliarian tendencies and this tax (which will raise internet connection prices) leaves less avenues of communication for the Hungarian citizens.
Note the prices for an internet connection; at 30 gbytes/month, this tax could double the entry level price. At the average salary in Hungary, the extra $18 will be felt.
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Then they ought to restore Erzebet Bathory's castle and promote it as a tourist destination for lesbian Goths -- or is that too narrow a demographic?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
This summary is a bit hysterical, in the excessively panicked sense. TFA indicates there is a cap on taxes for both individuals and service providers, and this DRAFT bill is likely to contain the same sort of provisions. Of course, whether such a tax is a good idea is up for debate, but statements like "could set back the country's technological development by some 20 years" are ridiculous. Excise taxes already exist on other goods and services without complete disaster.
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In other news, Blockbuster stock increased 5.7% today! The former movie-rental giant, which still allegedly has warehouses full of VHS tapes and DVD videos, says it is considering making a big push to get into Hungary. "Where there's a need, we want to be there," said the CEO. "When people are wanting entertainment, Blockbuster has got to move."
I am absolutely shocked. How about they cut their goddamn spending and subsist on the taxes they are already collecting before instituting a ridiculous "per-GB" internet tax. FFS, does the idea of spending less money ever even cross a government's mind? Now, before I get branded some evil right-winger racist luddite tinfoil hat wearing neanderthal, I don't disagree with taxes that perform a function.
If the government is providing a service or function, such as roads, technological infrastructure, schools, etc. I fully agree with taxes to support them. But taxing arbitrary goods/services provided by third parties just because you want to keep living high on the hog? That, to me, is a sickening example of why spending needs to be scrutinized and real fiscal responsibility needs to be in place in government. It's just too easy to keep spending when it's everyone else's money.
Stage 1 was confiscation of private pensions. No nation can not tax or confiscate its way out of political incompetence and corruption. This road leads to anarchy or war.
The problem with this is that other countries will see this as a good idea and we all end up paying more tax.
The government's just hungary for money.
They'd better Czech how much they can make.
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I guess then the proper thing to do is to form a cordon sanitaire on all internet services delivered to the Hungarian governmental organisations effectively blackout their entire operation. How is that for democracy :-)
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Then they ought to restore Erzebet Bathory's castle and promote it as a tourist destination for lesbian Goths -- or is that too narrow a demographic?
More like the wrong demographic, for one thing there is no indication Erzebet Bathory was gay and secondly she preferred corn fed country girls for her grizzly beauty rituals so agricultural communities would be a more likely place to look for victims than towns and cities which is where you are most likely to run into lesbian Goths.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
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Attempted Censorship by any other name....
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I usually use about 300 gigabyte a month easy due to streaming. This alone would add an extra $186 to the $63 a month I already pay. So essentially I would have a $249 bill if we were subject to something like this where I live. No thanks,I would just not have an internet connection and would tether off my phone when I needed to. If I just stuck with the necessities I would only need to get online with my PC for school work and what not, and this wouldn’t use much bandwidth at all. Also I could handle things like personal email with my phone, and all important email goes to my work email address which I only access at (you guessed it) work anyways.
Yes, adding yet another tax is one way to help that, but why do governments worldwide - mine included - never consider the possibility that they're spending too much money? When our government is spending money on swedish massages for rabbits and then whining that they don't have enough cash to toss around, I am completely uninterested in giving them a single penny more.
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Nice to see that the Christian Science Monitor completely misses the raid by Gordon Brown and the Labour Party after they won the elections in 1997 in the UK - they raided pension funds to the tune of £5Billion a year from the very start.
They could Sweden the pot with consumer subsidies.
These numbers are totally off. Which is a shame, because once optimized we would have slightly increased burden on bandwidth whales.
> tax could set back the country's technological development
Or, y'know, launch their tech forward, if it were applied back to the infrastructure it came from, as is appropriate.
Yes, I'm aware that's an impossibly big "if" in the sky. Just calling out the whine's poor phrasing.
If the government needs to collect more tax, why not raise the general tax levels rather than introduce this tax? The tax burden will be the same in both cases, but the internet tax takes it all from internet users rather than spreading it out (or even taking it preferentially from those who can afford it, like progressive tax does).
The main argument for specific taxes like this is to use it as an incentive for people to change their behavior. For example, one may tax driving in city centers to reduce the car traffic there. But surely internet is something one would want to encourage rather than discourage? It's an environmentally friendly way of obtaining knowledge and communicate, for example. The high use of internet probably increases children's reading skills too.
It's hard to see a good reason for using this kind of tax.
They did it wrong clearly.
The idea is that a certain amount of the economy is flowing through the internet and the government feels it has a right a fraction of that just as they claim from everything.
I can get that far.
Then I get what they did by charging by bandwidth. This is an attempt to make the tax progressive so that small users pay very little and big users pay a lot. I get that too.
The problem with this idea is that the amount of traffic is accelerating and the tax isn't reasonable if everyone's internet speed goes up by a factor of ten or something.
A more reasonable tax would be a per user tax on the ISPs. I'm quite sure they already have those... so... increase them I guess if they want more. That gets us to a tax that should bring in decent revenue without limiting people to lower bandwidth.
How to make that progressive?... I guess you could say anyone with low income could file for relief from that tax... or you could just have bandwidth tiers. Every company has tiers... this is the 3mb tier, this is the 7 mb tier... all the way up to 200 mb or something. Have the tax associated with given tiers be reset yearly or something so it can keep pace.
That or just dont' have a progressive tax... progressive taxes are stupid.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...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.
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That is just a Turkey of a deal.
Time to offend someone
It says the average is $17-$41 USD I have no idea what the US average is but in my area of the mid-west $39 for a middle tier account is fairly common.
The prime minister of Hungary wants to transform Hungary into a "un liberal" state. In short he wants to play Putin in his country. His primary goal right now is to push out any foreign investment. This new law targets that and in addition may help to control the opposition. The normal media is already under his control.
A yes and in addition Hungary is becoming more and more racist.
I bet there are going to be some epic lan parties again! Man do i miss those days. I don't miss the lugging my tower and monitor around, but Now that laptops run games so well, you'd think lans would come back.
Well, then submit a Poland see what everyone else thinks.
Just get a VPN account from some UK provider and route all your traffic through there. Easy peasy! :-) (just in case)
I live in a suburb of Budapest and T-Mobile provides everything I get from them over ip. Television, phone and internet. I wonder if this means I'd pay that tax on all of it - on top of the other taxes already being paid.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Oh oh I got the solution to this one!
Every time the government levies a tax against your business, just pass the tax onto the consumer. Problem solved!
We'll make great pets
That will be delegated to the ISPs.
Ah yes, the forceful delegation of government responsibilities, and their cost, to businesses. Now an ISP is forced to basically become the tax man.
Well, if Hungary wants to go back to the communistic age, they're welcome to do so. But please stay the F out of the EU and join the USSRv2 with Ukraine.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
According to what? Your pseudorandom hyperbole generator?
20 years ago was 1994. I used the internet in 1994.
I tried to find something about it, but there isn't anything worthy in English so:
Where will they meter it? On Budapest Internet Exchange (BIX)? Between Tier 1 to Tier 2 connection? Lower than that? Will they meter somewhere inside ISP's network?
As I can see that most of the data could be cached at the ISP. Netflix is giving away their OCA's to ISP's, and if Netflix can cache their streaming videos, than almost everything could be cached. Yeah, I know, HTTPS is a bitch, but there are ways to build a web application and still have enough places to use HTTP. So the bandwidth could be lowered, if people are ready to get "stale" data.
Another route is to, as somebody suggested, build a massive unregulated wireless (mesh) network. With endpoints inside the goverment buildings (will they pay this tax?). Or extend it to neighbouring countries without the tax! Or use an international ISP over satellite?
Even in the US such an amount wouldn't be a tax in the sense of raising revenue, but an attempt to stifle usage. That is a lot per GB, even at US income levels. As such in Hungary, this is even more restrictive, given the lower income levels. It is for sure an attempt to stifle usage, and not a legitimate revenue measure.
Pulling a full feed will be about $10k/day.. lol
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You ignorant slut.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I can't possibly imagine where the other 90% would end up.
Still, it's better than Greece & Italy. If they implemented it there it'd be out by two orders of magnitude.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"witless" and "fuckwit?"
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Since some US officials said they were dissatisfied with government of Hungary, we must now expect some colored revolution to throw away the constitutional government. What will the CIA choose to ignite the thing? Perhaps an internet tax?
Uh, thats what Labour did in 1997 - there is no state pension fund to be raided...
Anyone else picturing Audrey Hepburn singing that to Rex Harrison?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."