public means public, if something is paid for by tax money, it should be licensed for public use
Broadcast license is what broadcasters pay for in order to be allowed to broadcast the licensed content.
The downside is that it's a per head (or per household) sum, not coupled to income like taxes would be. This is usually explained away by the fee being separate from the state, but the reality is that Germany actually has it all implemented, in the form of the opt-in "church tax" coupled to taxable income just like regular tax. Handled by the tax office, but not going too government coffers. Would be so easy to extend the implementation to public broadcasting, because you don't pay to consume the media, you pay to live in an environment that is not dominated by profit-driven broadcasting media. There are many negative things to say about our public broadcasting, but when I look at other countries that don't have strong public broadcasting, it's so much the lesser evil, totally worth the fee.
(personally, I'd love to see that "church tax implementation" opened up to all kinds of opt-in membership organisations that would see value in income-coupled membership fees, I believe that a lot of good things could work that way, with people of all income levels enjoying an objectively fair way of contributing)
Back in Portugal, we took the approach that radio tax is part of the electricity bill, and when TVs came to be, the radio tax became TV tax as well.
Nothing else, doesn't matter how many people live on the household, if there are Internet devices, radio on the car, whatever.
Same applies to the church tax, everyone pays, it is part of the taxes and no one else, besides the state gets to see how much it is in practice.
When I think of "Contributions" I think of a voluntary transfer of money, whether from an individual to an organization or from an individual to themselves (like "contributions" to an IRA or 401k for example). But a contribution could even be sharing ideas with a group of friends (contributing to the conversation) or anything really.
Beitrag Wikipédia pages are available in other languages, namely Swedish and Esperanto. The meaning doesn't exactly match German's.
The key difference is that taxes are completely under discretion of parliamentary control, whereas the Rundfunkbeitrag is under discretion of the individual broadcast authority governance boards (which are too closely tied to politicians for my comfort, but that's another thing).
A Beitrag is bound to a well defined objective which means it is determined what the money will be used for at the moment it is collected whereas a Steuer contributes to the household as such.
Also, public TV is not controlled by the government but by a council that is more or less democratic. Still far from perfect, sure
Of the countries I lived in, the quality of the broadcasting and reporting in Germany has been the better one so far.
And when you see the flow of vomit produced by most of the private television in the countries around, you realise that the compromise is not perfect, but it's nonetheless miles ahead of most other options.
You also quickly realise that most private channels are owned by powerful players pushing their own agenda, which can bring even more bias and one-sidedness.
Duty. (like stamp duty)
Fee.
Licence/License. (maybe like the BBC licence fee?)
Levy. (see below)
There is also the concept of the hypothicated tax. The only exemplar I know is the Australian Medicare levy, the money is solely to be used, and spent on Medicare, and no other purpose enshrined in law. People often claim petrol tax was designed to pay for roads infrastructure but it wasn't legally bound, and is not a hypothicated tax. Nor is the ULEZ and like costs to drive in the inner city with a petrol engine. They are designed to discourage use of ICE not to pay for them.
https://www.heise.de/news/BGH-Urteil-Staatlicher-Wetterdiens...