Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

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> The United Kingdom is somewhat unique in the world for requiring those households which view broadcast television to purchase a licence for the privilege

Not really, we have that in Slovenia too.

In the past, you could avoid it by claiming you had no tv (and a grey-legal area of letting them verify). Then they expanded and added the "radio" part, where you paid less if you have a radio (and no tv), including car radio.

Then they added internet streaming, and expanded the definition of "tv" to "any device, capable of viewing streamed content" (pc, smartphone), so if you have a smartphone, you have to pay for tv, just because you have a device capable of watching a stream.

There have been many calls to just encrypt the over-the-air broadcasts, and create usernames and passwords for paying customers for streaming, but they prefer the "catch-all" definitions of "tv", so they can collect monthly subscriptions from pretty much every household in the country.

Our private tv stations are not much better... the most viewed one, did a nasty deal with the cable/iptv operators, wanting either a lot of money for their tv channels as a searate option, or less money if their tv stations are put into "basic"(=cheapest, smaller) cable packages, so they forced a price increase for every cable/iptv subscriber and there's no way to cancel just their channels.

I live in Europe now, and I'm fine with high taxation. But for heaven's sake, call a tax a tax.

There are so many little things, whether its TV licenses, overpriced interactions with the DNV equivalent, overpriced tolls that were promised to be eliminated. The list goes on.

Fortunately most European countries have an awesome statistics office that gives visibility into government wastage. Unfortunately, the the social democracies historically(?) stuffed their public sectors in lieu of full employment policies, and bureaucracy is an existential threat over here.

> I live in Europe now, and I'm fine with high taxation. But for heaven's sake, call a tax a tax.

The BBC is license-fee funded rather than tax funded so that (in theory at least) they don't have to rely directly on the government for funding - private citizens directly fund the corporation.

This goes some way to ensuring more independence, and fairer news output.

In reality, the government holds the BBC to ransom every eight years when the royal charter they operate under is re-written. There will always be claims of political bias on both sides.

A tax would be fairer than the actual system is. You have to pay a fixed amount regardless of your income. (At least in Germany and the UK)

That's not really 'fairer' in any absolute sense, and a tax needn't be a rate, nevermind one w.r.t. income, but it could be, or even progressive.

I'd probably argue 'fair' would be per usage, or per television. The latter would even be easier to implement - just slap a duty on sales as with alcohol and tobacco.

(Actually, that would be great, the defining characteristic would presumably be the presence of a tuner (or network in today's age?), so it would create a market for television-like panels without tuners or consequently without being 'smart', I'd hope.)

Here in Germany every internet capable device is considered for the license, so your system would fail there as well (being unfairer).

It would obviously fairer if they made a paywall, but also defeat the purpose (they don't fulfill anyway).

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