Broadband tax another French bull in the china shop
Earlier this week, the EU’s Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Luxembourger Viviane Reding, condemned French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposal to tax broadband usage.
‘One cannot wish to solve the problem of [low] broadband penetration in France and want to create a tax on broadband at the same time,’ Reding said. ‘I think that goes against any logic.’
Reding was the UK’s Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA)’s selection for Internet Villain of the Year in 2007. In 2008, HM Revenue and Customs beat Sarkozy by a nose. The BPI, BT Wholesale and David Cameron were also-rans.
Sarkozy’s latest wheeze aims to provide a revenue alternative to advertising on French public broadcast television and radio. He said it would be an ‘infinitesimal tax,’ but France Telecom’s CEO Didier Lombard knows the thin end of a wedge when he sees one. Lombard said that if the tax were introduced, cheap rate flat fee broadband would suffer.
As in Britain, the French state seeks to encourage domestic content production with subsidies. Both models foster in-group mediocrity, but in France the quality of domestic product has long taken second place to linguistic nationalism.
It is a paradox that in Britain the cultural mediocracy can perpetuate itself through the compulsory license fee, whereas in France, where intellectuals are taken seriously, the state has never seen fit to grant them similar financial autonomy.
