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>So the government came up with this tax nonsense as a distraction. As you can see they achieved their goal. Everybody is talking about the internet tax while the government is doing business with the Russians under cover.

Sorry, but lest this is marked as "informative" by anyone due to it coming from a native Hungarian, I'd like to say (as a neighborhood) that this "it's a distraction" sounds like the usual ideas of how goverment works put forward by some blogs, columnists, that are not really grounded in reality.

It's not like Hungary only does "business with the Russians" for the very short term that this will be in the news, for it being a "distraction" to be effective.

It's also not like there would be any popular backslash on "doing business with the Russians" at this particular time either, so that they would need a distraction.

It's more likely that they just wanted an extra tax and some extra dough coming their way, and came up with this, sans distraction nonsense.

They want to distract Hungarians not foreigners.

I know. That's what I tried to debunk -- its supposed usefulness (and even more so, need) as a way to distract Hungarians.

The opinion when this came up on /r/europe was that it was an attempt at clamping down on access to independent and non-Hungarian media by making internet use unaffordable.

Edit: well, that seems comprehensively debunked

it's capped at 4k HUF at most (~10€), that seems like a very inneffective way to do it.

I mean, you get free press (Metropol, elsewhere known as Metro, which IIRC is swedish) at metro stations, it would make more sense to tax _that_ if you really wanted to clamp independent media.

Also, many people with a smartphone aged 25+ have a company-payed one, so the tax is irrelevant to them. (source: anecdotal evidence as someone living in hungary)

Metro is not "free press", it's a joke of a newspaper. Nobody can seriously think to rely on Metro for political or hard-hitting news.

What if the tax is just a trojan horse? If it's introduced, the government will have to install "smart meters" somewhere, checking who consumed what in order to reconcile it with the amount of paid tax. The move from "smart meters" to "total eavesdropping capability" is then just a firmware update away.

Only they can already do that with the cooperation of the ISPs or control of the national backbones, with no need for some tax. And probably they are already doing it. And worse, the "five eyes" are doing too (worse, as they are not even your own elected government).

"free press" meant "gratis" in this context.

If you really think the political news/anything ratio is higher in the average megabyte of internet download than in Metro I am afraid you live in a very unusual bubble.

That doesn't hold water either. 150 HUF/GB is nowhere near unaffordable.

For personal use it's really affordable, but what about companies like saas, online magazine, newspaper etc?

Taxes paid by the non-elite only go up over time.

Actually without a datacap it becomes quite expensive.

Purchase a modern AAA game on steam, they're around 30G. Instant 15e additional tax when downloading it. And that tax gets paid every time you redownload anything.

Also netflix becomes a lot more expensive. 50 cents per hour for standard definition or 1.5 euros per hour in HD.

there is a cap on the tax though, you'd basically pay extra on the first couple of movies (well, there isn't any netflix in hungary, so you'd be paying for torrents)

While it's probably smoke screen, it's outright stupid and very harmful. The context is a bit more complicated than Hungary doing business with Russia, the government probably does need this money as it's doing stupid (and counter productive) spending to increase their popularity among the the less educated and the ones who are less willing to think critically. From this perspective, their move is clever: it's smoke screen and they can back up later and they win or they don't have to back up that much and they also win. The only way for them to lose is if it turns out to be an ignition bomb (much like the plan to cut the trees in park Gezi in Turkey).

The move itself, even with an upper cap of 3-10EURs would be devastating and pointing to the wrong direction. Hungary's only option to rise would be education and the strengthtening of the IT sector. But that would need at least 10 years of investment and we're still only talking about it. BTW, there was a news bite I think on the same day that this utter stupid move was announced, that we should make the IT education stronger, we should teach more IT in elementary school, blah-blah. Sounds like something that should have been (and indeed have been) said in like 2000. Yet nothing happened, apart from cutting back IT classes last year.

This is yet another step in the wrong direction. Totally wrong direction.

Oh, and the context: the national tax authority has been known and proven to support criminals who stole around 30M EUR of VAT/yr. It's been in the news, nothing happened. Then the idiots tried to force a US company to pay them (high ranking officials of the tax authority) to launch attacks on the competition of the said US company. That's when they notified the US authorities and that's how prominent Hungarian politicians (and/or their immediate comrades) were banned from the US. And this is what this smoke screen is intended to cover. Hopefully it will add up in the heads of people.

Correction: it's indeed 30Bn EUR/year...

Actually I think it’s more related to the corruption charges: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/20/us-usa-hungary-idU...

It's a pretty bad smoke screen if it makes more people angry than the other issue they trying to "smoke". Even if it will cost less it's a bad PR for the government and can lower their popularity among the young generation who didn't care about the other issues.

How exactly is Russia blackmailing Hungary? Are they preventing Hungary from doing business with the EU or USA? What threats are used?

From what I read (even from your own comment), it's the other way around.

The US doesn't want Hungary to do business with Russia and it even threatens the Hungarian government. For example, the US administration banned Hungarian govt officials from entering the US a few days ago.

But I have yet to read about a single threat the Russians made towards the Hungarians, if they do not stop doing business with the US.