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Hungary's Plans For Internet Tax On Hold After Protests
An anonymous reader writes: When news broke last week that the Hungarian government was planning to tax internet traffic at a rate of about 62 cents per gigabyte, people on the internet were outraged. But it went beyond that: there were protests in the streets in Hungary, and the European Union warned against the plan. Now, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has put the plans on hold, saying, "This tax in its current form cannot be introduced." It's not completely dead — Orban has planned consultations over the next year to look for other ways to tax revenue generated over the internet.
I honestly can't say how much traffic I pass. I'm curious as to how they came up with the rate they did, and how that number looks in Euros rather than US Dollars...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It shows one more time, how retarded can be some politicians. Normal households have 40-200GB/month traffic, which is insane $24 - $124 extra per month. I hope Hungarians will kick him out for good.
P.S. I am sure, if they can, they will tax even air for breathing.
In a world where bandwidth has never been cheaper and companies and people make use of such. It is amazing to me that a government would think in any way by bringing those bandwidth costs back up to pre-who knows how long ago levels that this would only end in nothing but failure and screeching to a halt any company that'd want to setup shop, revolt by citizens etc. Strange world
DD-WRT has daily and monthly usage counters. It's become a point of pride for my roommates and I how big we can get our high score.
0.62 x 320 = $198 (1 megabit).
On Cox, I normally use 450 GB/mo. My bill is around $60. I can't imagine paying +$300. That's tantamount to a violent and bloody revolution!
With so much video being streamed today even 1 cent would have brought in considerable revenue. While I wouldn't approve of a tax of even 1 cent, it is hard to imagine how they came up with such a high target tax rate. For many their tax bill would likely be 5x higher than their Netflix subscription. How did they possibly think this would fly? Even is you eschewed online video the amount of data just see the news on CNN inexoribly climbs higher and higher every year with all the video add bloat on the sides. Sure, tax me on stuff I don't want to see anyway -- I think adblock downloads will skyrocket.
Maybe Hugary isn't the biggest market, but content providers everywhere would band to fight a trend like this.
Letter To Iran
A proposed internet tax is the least of problems with Hungary's current government. Selected headlines from around the web:
The Guardian: Hungary's rabid right is taking the country to a political abyss
The Tablet: Meet Europe’s New Fascists
The Telegraph: Inside the far-Right stronghold where Hungarian Jews fear for the future
Aljazeera: Hungary: Towards the Abyss Investigating why critics of Hungary's authoritarian government believe it is leading the country towards fascism
The Tablet's, tagline is "A New Read on Jewish Life" and of course Aljazeera is Islamic. The Telegraph and Guardian are respectable British publications. They all agree that Hungary is leaning fascist.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Ever notice how the taxers never acknowledge they shit a big one when they propose a particularly hideous tax and get called on it?
This tax has been put "on hold", not burned, salted and buried in the deep grave as it deserves - and the sponsor disappear in disgrace from public life forever. The prime minister is unabashedly scheming how he can slip something else like it past the people as soon as possible.
I honestly can't say how much traffic I pass.
Me: 4-7GB mobile, hundreds through VDSL (50GB game downloads, Netflix etc, PS4 remote play streaming to my Vita). I don't live in Hungary (yet), but my internet tax as proposed would easily be a multitude of the actual service costs.
Maybe they *did* crunch the numbers. Maybe they wanted the taxes to be much higher than Netflix, to discourage things that use lots of bandwidth. Remember, video is the biggest user of bandwidth for most people, and certain kinds of people don't like video. Video brings in moving images -- not just images in motion, but images that move people to feel and act differently. There's a lot of pro-EU, pro-West video out there that Jobbik and pro-Russian Hungarians don't like. There's also porn and other video that "corrupts the youth" (the same charge that's been lobbed about since Socrates' day). Sin-taxing away video probably seemed like a good way to weaken the opposition to the right-wing ideologies.
When you're a politician, everything looks like a tax source.
They could have made it so unaffordable it could have given them a chance at nationalizing it and restricting it the way good socialists countries always do. Hopefully Obama will do it though. All Hail Dear Leader.
People are responding which is good but keep in mind it was just a stupid attempt from the governing party to lower the attention on the very embarrassing, unprecedented US travel ban, issued few weeks ago against a dozen Hungarian gov officials by the State Dept, precisely due to their role in the endemic corruption that now forcing US companies to pay up or get out (by all means and purposes corruption is now government-sanctioned in Hungary, pretty much unmatched anywhere in the Western world.) Unfortunately for the ruling party it worked so well that it galvanized an all-across opposition against them - now they have ghost out of the bottle, they have to be very careful how to deal with it because people are absolutely fed up with the ruling party. The arrogant and openly corrupt, totally incompetent gov officials are out of control eg new Sec of State is such an arrogant thirty-something bumbling idiot who just bought a house for almost a million dollar, all cash, without ever having any job, claiming his parents helped him... response to the public scandal? His colleague in the party (himself notorious for finding more and more, previously unreported rooms (!!!) in his super-expensive inner city apartment) quickly explained that actually having a giant pool in a dedicated building on your property is actually a real pain in the ass, there's nothing to be envy there... breathtaking cynicism, absolutely uninhibited arrogance at its worst - essentially these are mainly small town boys and village rednecks freely raping public coffers (did you hear about the PM's 'own' soccer stadium, built quite literally behind his weekend house in the village he grew up in?).
Corruption ran amok so badly in Hungary that now laws are regularly being re-written to fit certain ruling party people or oligarch's interests. It's totally systemic, you can only find similar level in Russia, Central-Asian or Latin- and South-American banana republics, India etc. It's really a shame that such a nice country in the middle of Europe plunged this deep and the EU is unable to force them to respect common standards.
And I'm not talking about Republican this time. I'm talking about the kind that Orban is. Basically, the political agenda he rides on is a simple one. It has to be so his target audience understands it. Find a scapegoat, blame him for everything, add some xenophobia and an external boogeyman, paint the other parties as corrupt and feeble (ok, that part was not THAT hard and is actually even not that far from the truth) and wrap it all in easy answers that any idiot can understand.
The result is the Hungarian government.
Of course something like this has to draw its money from something that their average voter neither understands nor uses heavily. And internet is still something in Hungary that requires you to have some sort of money. His poor idiots (i.e. his core voting group) won't be hit by that.
It's just politics for his voters. Next up is probably a tax on books without pictures, TV programs without explosions and anything that could be considered high brow entertainment.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
every time the name of Hungary's dictator appears on Da ISH, charge him personally ten euros tax. that ought to settle matters.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If I transfer a file over a direct ethernet/cat5e connection, between two devices which happen to also be connected to the Internet, I presume that doesn't count as taxable data-transfer.
But it would be taxed if I sent it over the Internet, even if the data never went further than the ISP.
What if we create large mesh-networks, such that commercial ISPs are only necessary for connecting meshes? As the meshes grow, the amount of tax to be paid tends toward zero.
Orban has planned consultations over the next year to look for other ways to tax revenue generated over the internet.
How come countries always double dip? ... dipping on already taxed money.
I already pay income tax on every cent I make. Any other taxes are double, triple,
I really hope I will see the day when we strangle politicians by their fucking neck ties.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
The propsed law a would not taxed a person more than $3 in total.