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Newspaper Wants Tax on Broadband to Save Failing Newspapers
$3 Per Broadband User Reward for Failure to Adapt

Like the recording industry, the newspaper industry has struggled to adapt to the new broadband age, and spends more than a little time blaming everyone other than themselves for the latency. UK newspaper The Guardian thinks it has a novel solution: applying a tax on all broadband users (no more than £2 a month insists author David Leigh) which is then given to the newspaper industry as a subsidy. That will supposedly save papers, improve journalism, all people will magically read quality content, and the world will be saved.

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Why reward the newspaper industry for failure to adapt to modern technology? Because people aren't paying for papers and someone really ought to force them to, insists Leigh:
quote:
People willingly pay this money to a handful of telecommunications companies, but pay nothing for the news content they receive as a result, whose continued survival is generally agreed to be a fundamental plank of democracy. A £2 levy on top – collected easily from the small number of UK service providers (BT, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk etc) who would add it on to consumers' bills – would raise more than £500m annually. It could be collected by a freestanding agency, on the lines of the BBC licence fee, and redistributed automatically to "news providers" according to their share of UK online readership.
You'll note the logic isn't much different from the entertainment industry, who has long tried (and failed) to argue that broadband connections should be taxed to counter piracy. Legacy companies with problems with adaptation (especially the older folks at those companies) always seem to assume that they're entitled to cash and other rewards simply because things changed, they didn't like the change, and therefore refused to adapt.

Most recommended from 64 comments



J E F F4
Whatta Ya Think About Dat?
Premium Member
join:2004-04-01
Kitchener, ON

2 recommendations

J E F F4

Premium Member

Quality

What is the expression? Everything you read in the newspaper is true, except those things that you have first hand knowledge of.

Reporting has gone to the dogs. It is inaccurate, sensationalism that mimics The World Weekly News.

You wanna sell papers? Make sure it's accurate. Make sure to check spelling and grammar. And when you make a correction the next day, don't be so vague on which your are apologizing for. "The actual name of the person was Mark Taninski, inaccurate information was printed yesterday. We apologize for this." What? What the hell are we talking about?

Sad thing is, if the UK does this, it will eventually migrate its way over here.