Aardvark Daily

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Let's tax the Internet!

Ah, the French!

They certainly have some interesting ideas from time to time. Unfortunately, many of those ideas, while interesting, are also downright stupid. As a result, it is not uncommon to see the French people rioting in the streets, setting fire to vehicles on the roads and generally engaged in rather extreme acts of civil unrest.

This week, they announced another attempt to provoke the people into such acts of outrage.

Yes, a proposal has been placed before the French President Francois Hollande which suggests that a one per cent tax be applied to all devices capable of accessing the internet.

Given the popularity of the Net and the urgent need by most European governments to hike revenues in a time of economic recession, this is probably looking like a great idea.

After all, it's only one per cent -- right? And after all, it's for a good cause -- right?

Well the "good cause", we're told, would be the creation of home-grown content in the form of music, images and videos.

However, if you take a quick gander at Google and YouTube, you'll see that France is already creating a fairly useful amount of music, images and videos -- without the need for a special tax to fund such work.

Call me cynical but this sounds like an attempt to create a new bureaucracy and jobs for the boys through yet another tax and spend initiative on the part of a government.

How much of the one per cent tax collected would actually end up funding these creative works? Not much I suspect, the vast majority of it being "consumed" by the wheels of the bureaucracy that would be set up to "manage" it.

We've seen all this happen before -- with things such as media taxes.

There are countries around the world which add a healthy tax to things such as blank CDs and DVDs, magnetic media and even USB/Flash drives -- on the promise that the funds raised will go to artists to offset their losses due to piracy.

On closer inspection however, those artists rarely see *any* money from this source -- virtually all of it being "consumed" by the process of collection and management. So why would the French initiative be any different?

Of course here, on the other side of the world, we might want to keep an eye on the actions of governments elsewhere on the planet. You can bet your bottom dollar that if the French people accept this tiny but unprecedented tax on the Net, NZ's politicians will be rubbing their hands with glee and cooking up similar plans -- although in our case I'm pretty sure that the money raised would go straight into the consolidated trough for essential expenses such as MPs super-schemes, overseas travel and accommodation for Ministers on "fact finding missions", etc.

But what do readers think? Would a 1% tax on smartphones, computers, netbooks, tablets and other "connected" devices really hurt? Might it be a great way to raise much-needed funds for the state coffers?

Perhaps *our* government could justify such a tax by claiming that it would allow them to claw back some of the losses they're suffering as a result of the direct importation of products that are not expensive enough to attract GST at the border.

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