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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the DR (Denmarks Radio - which is also a Public TV sort of like the BBC) license, you used to have to pay it for TV. I didn't have a tv so I stopped paying. Then a year or two later they passed a law that if you had a computer you had to pay.

I guess lots of European countries have a similar license.

They are phasing the license out in the next couple years, but it used to really piss me off because I never watched anything on DR but I still had to pay for it (ok I did accidentally see things if I was over at people's houses, it was nothing impressive). The assumption being of course that it was a public good.

Anyway - sub-regional pricing for Netflix etc.

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NHK in Japan has a similar scheme. If you have a TV you have to pay. If you have a phone that can receive TV signal, you have to pay. They'd even send people in person to "check if you have a TV". I believe they recently lost a court case on this.

In Britain, the BBC uses vehicles fitted with equipment to detect TVs, though who knows how effective they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van

It's unclear they even exist..or work..our could even theoretically work now we have digital. Their true enforcement strategy is to harass the small minority who don't pay the license fee.

For young people it's not a small minority. Young people have gone off transmitted TV and they havent adapted yet.

They have started to - they extended the relevant law to close loopholes about “real time” vs “prerecorded” BBC broadcasts, now you need a licence if you use the iPlayer for anything. Which is fair, even if it forced me to get a license again. I expect at some point the law will either get more draconian (by requiring a license for any broadband contract at home) or the BBC will become an actual streaming service like Netflix, with regular subscription (which would be a bit of a disaster, since it would basically mean the end of the BBC as we know it).

Most young people don't watch iPlayer either. It heavily tilted towards older people.

It will only be an issue for people who watch it...

I'm heavily against the license fee, as the majority of content could be delivered commercially. I absolutely hate that i'm paying money towards soaps, cake shows, misses brown boys etc which I will never have an interest watching and get zero value from.

The small amount of state or non commercial stuff it produces could be paid for by tax or a much smaller license fee.

The money i save could be spent a couple of books or rentals instead which I would get value from.

I'm also for getting rid of the licence fee but instead increasing taxes by equal measure and funding it that way. Hopefully enshrine that funding into law. The license fee is just too easy to attack nowadays.

I find the argument for purely commercial a selfish one as public broadcasting provides a lot of public good through educational means. I mean, just tune into The One Show or Spring Watch on an an evening and you'll get what I mean. Plus no ads!

And those are the minority of shows. So in reality i'm paying a lot of money for things that are commercial quality and not educational and don't use.

That's as about as selfish of not wanting to pay for a gym membership i don't use.

Well, yes. It's literally a protection racket, what do you expect from making that legal?

Funnily enough in one of the article's citations, the UK's government has funded SIGINT research for CRT and LCD televisions[0] to see if you're watching the BBC on the flat panel television inside your own home. I've been cold-called by cable companies while in college trying to sell me a cable subscription, and were absolutely baffled when telling them I didn't own a television.

[0] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/temc2013-tv.pdf

Oh I didn't hear about the court case, thanks! I'll see if I can track some information on that down.

I live in Japan, no tv and a phone that doesn't receive TV broadcast, but the nhk guys hastle us every month or two and almost convinced my wife to pay.

Some of the tactics I've heard of them using are quite scummy as well.

Edit:

Link to some information about the court case.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/06/27/national/crime-...

Happy to hear this might help you out! :)

I read this in Murakami's books. Was surprised at Japan doing this to her citizens!

In Finland there is a media tax that is taken out of everyone's salary. I don't think it's optional. I've never paid close enough attention to care. I think it subsidises our state broadcaster YLE and perhaps some other things. Maybe a Finn can chip in and explain...

> The public broadcasting tax, also known as the Yle tax, replaced the license fee in 2013. The tax ranges from 50 euros to 140 euros per person and per year, depending on income. Minors and persons with low income are exempt from the tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yle#:~:text=Yle%20tax,-Main%20....

Yeah, France has the "redevance télé". You have to explicitly refuse any cable service from your ISP in order not to pay it. Otherwise you're screwed. And its cost is significant, I will never pay for such thing.

> You have to explicitly refuse any cable service from your ISP in order not to pay it

Legally, you have to pay if you have a television in you home and you are subject to paying the residence tax (which will soon be applicable to less than 20% of homes anyway).

> And it's significant

No, it's not. It's like less than 0.5% of the tax you are paying (considering income tax, social tax, residence/homeowning tax, VAT...). They just keep it because they can rile up /distract people when they increase the TV tax by 5 euros.

And it is a way for the government to pressure public TV/radio into some obedience (since the government can basically cut a large part of their funding of these TV/radio by removing this tax).

> No, it's not. It's like less than 0.5% of the tax you are paying (considering income tax, social tax, residence/homeowning tax, VAT...). They just keep it because they can rile up /distract people when they increase the TV tax by 5 euros.

You don't know my income,monthly expenses, how many kids I have to feed, whether I have a mortgage, an alimony to pay or not... You have no idea what my budget is.

So less than 0.5% of what disposable income I have exactly? Tell me.

I'm not paying a flat tax (the tax doesn't depend on household income as you are insinuating) for something I have no use for at first place.

For context, it's 138€/year.

I just wanted it to be financed through taxes as it used to be.

It was completely ridiculous; after switching to a licensing model, DR’s costs for raking in money went up by about 15 million DKK just in fees to lawyers, if memory serves correctly.

We have the same scheme in Germany. The reason given for the fee vs. taxes I think is the independence of public broadcasting from the government. Imagine a bully as the head of government that can threaten to defund public broadcasting, if it doesn't report favorably for him.

Yes, the question is (and I won't pretend to know the answer), do the people have the need to be forced to pay to have independent journalism? Is there any country in the world, where free press works just as a product of a free market?

I'm living in Germany and I'm not super happy about the TV tax but I suppose we haven't got a better solution.

I think there are good examples, where the press operating in a free market can give good results. But the more important question is, if it is equal or better at its worst (which is exactly, when this is important).

Having a mix between private free press and publicly funded broadcasting probably creates some balance between the two worlds. I would expect the quality of the private press to decline (further), if we wouldn't have public broadcasting anymore.

Reuters does a pretty good job.

Well, in Denmark, government officials are part of the board of directors, so it's not independent either way.

Doesn't the parliament set spending? And if you're worried about the parliament not funding it, then why wouldn't you be worried about parliament just changing the law that set up the public broadcaster in the first place?

It isn't so simple. I think the federal government/parliament has to agree with the 16 state governments or so. There is a so called 'Rundfunkstaatsvertrag' (a treaty between states) governing the rules.

One reason might be that it's much easier to take a law changing the structure of the public broadcasting financing infront of the supreme court than it is to do so with regular budgeting.

This is what's happening in Australia to the ABC right now.

ive always thought this is a very moot argument. if the government decides to remove their backing from this scheme they still can. it really should be a tax, dependent on income. this whole apparatus for hunting people costs millions for nothing really...

Norway switched back to a tax-based model this year, where everybody above a certain income gets deducted between 150€ and 300€ more yearly. The cost to the average person went down, I assume that is mostly because there will be more total payers now. They also closed a 70-people office previously responsible for collecting the license fee.

Because of the shift in how people use TV and public access channels, in the Netherlands they simplified the whole scheme, got rid of the TV license entirely and just pay the public broadcasters through the regular state budget - e.g. "regular" taxes. It just saves a ton of headaches and complexity. I'm not "smol government" or whatever, but I do think laws and the like can be simplified by a lot.

In a similar vein, they simplified tax brackets for last year, instead of four brackets, there's now just two, and most people ended up paying less taxes (see https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/belastingplan/belas... for an infographic; keep in mind that while the lowest incomes do pay a little more taxes, they also get more money back from the government in stipends and subsidies for e.g. rent, health insurance, and a fixed 'discount' on taxes)

Note, before the tax change we had 3 brackets, not 4.

Also note: technically we have, and have always had 4 brackets. They just merged the tax brackets by setting limits and rates weirdly.

In Swedish 90s, there was a public information campaign series with vigilante kids putting a snail on the eye of people who don't pay their TV license.

I think everyone who was around then recognize the reference "Do you want a snail on your eye?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK0R-N0w8-Q

That is still the case in Ireland. It’s called a TV license. It’s an annual fee, that you have to pay as long as you have a TV, regardless of whether you use it for watching terrestrial TV or not. They even have a crew of inspectors who go around randomly knocking on doors to check if people are paying it.

Germany had TV or Radio, (every car got a radio...). Today it is per household, independent what you own.

As a student, unemployed or otherwise paid from the state it isn't a problem, you let them pay it. But if you are single, you have to pay the 210€/yr on your own.

In Italy the TV tax is now auto-included in the facilities bill. You have to explicitly declare that you don't have a TV and repeat it each year.

Up until two or three years ago or so we used to have to pay a public TV license for the public TV and radio broadcaster in Norway if we had a TV or tuner capable of receiving TV signals. Some people just opted to not having TVs or disabling any receiver capabilities.

Then they simply moved the collection of the license to your taxes so you don't see it explicitly, and of course now it does not matter if you don't have a TV.

Everyone pays the TV tax regardless, but it is somewhat progressive with low income residents paying somewhat less than higher income ones. I don't really mind paying for the public broadcaster as they serve as a guarantee for public, independent news.

What does annoy me is that they compete for the rights to broadcast super expensive sports and culture events (olympics, various football leagues, eurovision, etc). This greatly increases their budgets while not providing essential news value to the public not equally well served by private media broadcasters. Some of their own tv-series productions are well made and would not get the green light at private broadcasters and channels, so I would rather they focus on those.

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