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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
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.
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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Hungarian dude here.
1. That will be delegated to the ISPs. The plan is, that the ISPs should pay these taxes from their profits, and are expected NOT to increase the internet subscription fees, however, they will anyhow.
2. It is a tax on everything. not just streaming.
3. They won't leave anything untaxed.
Hey, it was! This is just a draft proposal. Nothing implemented yet.
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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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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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.
0.02 what? Let's hope Hungarian ISPs can do math better than Verizon!
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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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I do know how will they pay without increasing fees. I am using 200-300GB of Internet per month, and I pay around 20-30 euros of Internet... it is easy to do the math, the tax would be 180 dollars.
A large percentage of revenues from this tax will come from piracy and pornography. Nice way to fund a government and an interesting way to establish a conflict of interest in those matters.
Why should the ISP pay out of their profit?
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
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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Dont say nonsense. headers are just around 10% of traffic at most, and yes, they do count. After all it is traffic anyway.
Easy, government will forbid increasing fees.
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.
Lrn2network before you get haughty with others on the subject. Keepalives, pings, dhcp requests... there are a shit-ton of ways to generate traffic where the header is the majority of the payload. No, it's not common for that to make up a significant portion of internet traffic per node, but it's certainly possible, and not at all "nonsense."
...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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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.
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.
According to what? Your pseudorandom hyperbole generator?
ICMP is *data* last time I checked, and not necessarily done by your provider. Are you doing peer-to-peer every day? Even then, yes, nowadays I am seeing far more ICMP network scans. A lot. Will measure it. But then again, ICMP are not "headers", it is certainly valid traffic. We are talking about 300MB per day, or 12MB per hour. Truth it I used to see scans using up to 300 BYTES per hour 1 decade ago. Will measure it nowadays....