Richard Leggett on New Media

This absolutely infuriated me. The Times newspaper is reporting a proposed £20 ($28.50 USD) yearly tax for all broadband users in the UK. This tax would pay the media conglomerates for piracy. On top of that, they also plan to enforce broadband suppliers to extend their range to everyone within their domain, so that every rural farmhouse has acccess to at least a (laughable) 2Mb connection. I presume they’ll update that every year when 2Mb isn’t enough to squeeze out a modest low-quality YouTube stream?

Since when did the government decide it owned the internet or the companies that provide internet access in order to be able to impose a tax in the first place? I know it’s not as black and white as this, but it’s definitely our responsibility to take action before this government continues to take away every choice we have.

Follow up:

We’re a land of tertiary industry now, making us a high-risk society in turbulent times (the recent wide-spread factory closures and automotive disaster should enforce this), and the desperate throes of the government to stabilise our future when the world is in a state of flux is at times disheartening.

In a way this “tax” is not so different from how we pay for crime in general, we already pay for others’ wrong-doings. The taxes we pay in turn pay for the policing of an assortment of violent crimes, fraud, burglary and so on. So is this right? I don’t think so, but the police don’t just police the physical environment that we live in, the land that we do not own but have come to call our home, they also get involved with virtual crimes when your credit card is cloned or your kid is groomed on Facebook. Unfortunately we don’t have the choice to live outside the law, no physical or “virtual” part of the UK is out of their jurisdiction, you are forced to accept the trade-off between protection and payment, or move elsewhere (somewhere naturally inhospitable perhaps).

Regarding the legal right to broadband, yeah it could be a fantastic way to increase the number of people paying this tax, just as everyone with a TV, a radio or any capable device is legally required to pay over £100 a year to fund the BBC. Indeed BT (the national telephone company) *has* to provide every house in the UK a voice line, so why not data too (given ADSL works over that same line with the correct conditions).

Someone on Slashdot points out that this does not play well with the business models of Apple’s iTunes store, Amazon.com, and the rest of the bricks and mortar and virtual shop-fronts we use to get our media. Added to that anyone releasing music or video as an independent is just as susceptible to piracy, but they won’t see a penny of this because it’ll go straight to the big guys. Let’s hope this is just another toe in the water from a clueless thinktank that has been told to think big and think fast, the real aim here I would imagine is to gauge the public reaction and then slip in a law that is a half-step between so that “everyone” wins.