By Alexandra Radius
In France, the government is finding yet another way to get money out of us… its currently engaged in talks to extend the TV licence to computers as a new method of accessing television content. Simply put, this means that soon, those who do not own a television but do own a computer will have to pay for the privilege. According to the government, this is one of the ways of ensuring autonomous and long-term financing for the public audiovisual industry (particularly now that advertising is no longer allowed on public channels!)
One of the problems with the proposal as it currently stands is that there is no discrimination between users with different types of Internet access – so it may apply both to broadband subscribers and to those subscribers who could never watch TV on the Internet because their slow connection and lack of bandwidth makes it impossible to do so.
So what happens to those people who can’t, or simply don’t, watch TV on their computer? I’m not sure that more than a small percentage of the people who decide not to have a television set in the first place are going to watch TV on their computer. Not having a TV is becoming a lifestyle choice for a growing number of people in France where the quality of programmes on public TV is often not up to scratch. I’m sure they’ll be overjoyed if the proposal is ever put into action.
And what about the people who have a computer, but no Internet access? Rare, I imagine in this day and age, but they surely exist.
These and many other questions are still up in the air and are likely to stimulate a lot of debate and disagreement. I’m not in favour of these measures, particularly in this time of economic crisis and they could penalise one of the rare growth sectors that continues to create employment. I think the government is trying to establish this tax to not only subsidise lost earnings from advertising on public television, but taxes lost because of Internet downloading. I’m also sceptical as the government hasn’t proposed other ways to finance the public audiovisual service. Why not propose a tax directly on internet or triple play service providers? Possibly because they will pass the cost along to their subscribers anyway...
For now, nothing has been decided, but it feels like this is imminent and I’m wondering when the government will extend the tax to the mobile sector? Is it going to make all the users of 3G mobile phones subject to the licence as well? I think this is only the tip of the iceberg and that we may well have to get used to paying extra for our beloved high tech devices.
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