For someone who’s portrayed as an economic reformer that understands, for example, why a 35-hour workweek is a disastrous idea, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s newly announce plan to tax Internet connections to subsidize television is quite shocking. From the IHT:
But France, like other countries around the world, is struggling to find ways to keep cultural industries, like video and music, afloat at a time when their traditional audiences are waning. Sarkozy, proposing “a real cultural revolution” and stressing twice that his proposal was “unprecedented,” said: “I want us to profoundly review the requirements of public television and to consider a complete elimination of advertising on public channels.” Instead, he said, those channels “could be financed by a tax on advertising revenues of private broadcasters and an infinitesimal tax on the revenues of new means of communication like Internet access or mobile telephony.”
Do I really have to spell out how this not only props up an antiquated technology that people seem not to want, but simultaneously stifles innovation of the technology that people do want? You know, maybe we should tax digital cameras to subsidize Kodak’s film technology.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.