Decades ago, television was the only mass-market way of distributing multimedia content. It was expensive to create television stations and the medium allowed only a small amount of total content to be distributed every day, so content needed to be selected. In order to keep television from being taken over by political or corporate interests, it made sense to create publicly supported television stations.
But that's not the situation anymore. In 2004, anybody can get their information on-line and anybody else can access it. More and more people get all their information from the Internet. There is little need for public support of television anymore. The money would be better spent on creating publicly accessible Internet archives of all legislative sessions, debates, and other political interactions.
What this is really about now is that powerful but obsolete institutions don't want to go away. German public television knows that they are threatened by the Internet and are losing viewers. That's why they are so desparate to put content on-line and claim that people have to pay for those offerings.
This is, actually, a very valid point, as far as I am concerned. I don't want an American situation over here where TV is controlled by some conservative media czars,
US viewers have far more detailed and unbiased coverage of politics available than German viewers: a vibrant network of public radio and television stations, C-SPAN, and numerous high-quality commercial offerings. "Conservative media czars" don't control US television, they simply happen to be very popular. Yes, Americans watch garbage because they choose to, not because they have to.
It won't affect many people, as their household is most likely to have a TV already.
But it will affect many businesses and (probably) educational and not-for-profit institutions. And the extra costs that those businesses incur will have to be passed on to you just as surely as if that money had been taken out of your own pocket.
Everybody will get hurt by that because companies will have to pay the fee, too. Those costs will make goods and services more expensive, they will make German exports less competitive, and they will increase prices for German consumers. The money doesn't even get transferred just to any other industry, it gets transferred to an industry (German public broadcasting) that creates products with very little potential for export.
And if those fees will have to be paid by educational institutions for their Internet-connected PCs, as seems likely, it will put a further strain on already tight educational budgets.
And for what? How many people with Internet-connected PCs are watching German public television at work? Employers generally don't permit this, and, be honest, licking envelopes is probably more fun than daytime German public television.
if you already have a TV set, you already pay this fee. (Most households already have a TV set and pay 48.45 EUR every three months to the GEZ.)
But the households that don't have a TV set probably don't have one because they just don't want television at all. Since the GEZ fee is ostensibly a user fee, it makes little sense to charge these people.
(BTW, the point that public broadcasting should be financed from taxes and not have a special authority for this is IMHO very valid. Would mean less bureaucracy, and a more fair distribution of burden.)
This, I fully agree with. Public broadcasting should be supported through taxes--tax support means lower expenses (compared to having a separate billing apparatus) and it automatically makes contributions progressive. And I think that tax-supported public broadcasting is very valuable; it just has to serve a public purpose. The German "public" broadcasters, however, are just behavving like heavily subsidized private broadcasters.
In toto, this is not an Internet tax but just a closure of a gap for those people who have abolished their TV set in order to get the TV stream via http.
They are trying to tax businesses with Internet connected PCs. Do you seriously want to argue that any significant number of people watch television at work on their work-provided PCs?
Second, for the people who don't have TV at home, your reasoning is faulty. Streaming video via the Internet is so inconvenient that it is hardly a replacement for a simple TV receiver. Most people who don't have TV's at home probably don't have them because the broadcasters aren't offering anything they are interested in. PCs are mostly used for browsing the web and E-mail.
The justification for this fee is balloney. The German public broadcasting system just wants more money. They are afraid of private competition and they are afraid because people generally are getting less interested in the medium. Everybody wants more money, I suppose, but in a democracy and market economy, we generally don't allow companies to just extort it. Furthermore, I see no justification for them to ask for this money: their efforts already extend far beyond their defined purpose as public broadcasters.
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Yes, the BBC creates high-quality programming, but German public television, for the most part, does not.
Decades ago, television was the only mass-market way of distributing multimedia content. It was expensive to create television stations and the medium allowed only a small amount of total content to be distributed every day, so content needed to be selected. In order to keep television from being taken over by political or corporate interests, it made sense to create publicly supported television stations.
But that's not the situation anymore. In 2004, anybody can get their information on-line and anybody else can access it. More and more people get all their information from the Internet. There is little need for public support of television anymore. The money would be better spent on creating publicly accessible Internet archives of all legislative sessions, debates, and other political interactions.
What this is really about now is that powerful but obsolete institutions don't want to go away. German public television knows that they are threatened by the Internet and are losing viewers. That's why they are so desparate to put content on-line and claim that people have to pay for those offerings.
This is, actually, a very valid point, as far as I am concerned. I don't want an American situation over here where TV is controlled by some conservative media czars,
US viewers have far more detailed and unbiased coverage of politics available than German viewers: a vibrant network of public radio and television stations, C-SPAN, and numerous high-quality commercial offerings. "Conservative media czars" don't control US television, they simply happen to be very popular. Yes, Americans watch garbage because they choose to, not because they have to.
It won't affect many people, as their household is most likely to have a TV already.
But it will affect many businesses and (probably) educational and not-for-profit institutions. And the extra costs that those businesses incur will have to be passed on to you just as surely as if that money had been taken out of your own pocket.
Not many people will be hurt by this:
Everybody will get hurt by that because companies will have to pay the fee, too. Those costs will make goods and services more expensive, they will make German exports less competitive, and they will increase prices for German consumers. The money doesn't even get transferred just to any other industry, it gets transferred to an industry (German public broadcasting) that creates products with very little potential for export.
And if those fees will have to be paid by educational institutions for their Internet-connected PCs, as seems likely, it will put a further strain on already tight educational budgets.
And for what? How many people with Internet-connected PCs are watching German public television at work? Employers generally don't permit this, and, be honest, licking envelopes is probably more fun than daytime German public television.
if you already have a TV set, you already pay this fee. (Most households already have a TV set and pay 48.45 EUR every three months to the GEZ.)
But the households that don't have a TV set probably don't have one because they just don't want television at all. Since the GEZ fee is ostensibly a user fee, it makes little sense to charge these people.
(BTW, the point that public broadcasting should be financed from taxes and not have a special authority for this is IMHO very valid. Would mean less bureaucracy, and a more fair distribution of burden.)
This, I fully agree with. Public broadcasting should be supported through taxes--tax support means lower expenses (compared to having a separate billing apparatus) and it automatically makes contributions progressive. And I think that tax-supported public broadcasting is very valuable; it just has to serve a public purpose. The German "public" broadcasters, however, are just behavving like heavily subsidized private broadcasters.
In toto, this is not an Internet tax but just a closure of a gap for those people who have abolished their TV set in order to get the TV stream via http.
They are trying to tax businesses with Internet connected PCs. Do you seriously want to argue that any significant number of people watch television at work on their work-provided PCs?
Second, for the people who don't have TV at home, your reasoning is faulty. Streaming video via the Internet is so inconvenient that it is hardly a replacement for a simple TV receiver. Most people who don't have TV's at home probably don't have them because the broadcasters aren't offering anything they are interested in. PCs are mostly used for browsing the web and E-mail.
The justification for this fee is balloney. The German public broadcasting system just wants more money. They are afraid of private competition and they are afraid because people generally are getting less interested in the medium. Everybody wants more money, I suppose, but in a democracy and market economy, we generally don't allow companies to just extort it. Furthermore, I see no justification for them to ask for this money: their efforts already extend far beyond their defined purpose as public broadcasters.