Canada says online streaming services must hand over 5% of their revenues
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It's amazing that this South Park clip just gets more and more true every year. "Canada wants more money! Other countries get lots of money, we want some of that money. How about the Internet? Internet makes lots of money!"
In Austria there's a tax on all devices with built-in storage, from phones to blank DVDs and external HDDs, because the association of movies and music IP holders claim digital storage is used to store pirated content so it's their way of clawing back revenue lost to piracy.
You can't make this up. That South Park skit is spot on for this country. I think there's similar taxes in other countries too.
In France, for every storage devices (USB stick included), for every smartphone (which has storage), even for GPS (related .. god knows how) : you pay a tax. Because of said device, you could store a file "shared" by somebody else (that is, a file you did not pay for).
You MUST pay the tax.
As such, I consider my right to store files "shared" by somebody else. I paid for it, ffs.
From TFA:
> Major online streaming services operating in Canada will be required to contribute 5% of their Canadian revenues
It’s a society trying to incentivize investment within the society, because the society’s products/services are not cost competitive with products/services from another society. If it is due to economies of scale, there is almost no way to incentivize that other than to penalize the outside products/services.
This was Trudeau/Freeland's idea of "getting back at the man for nafta 2"
> Major online streaming services operating in Canada will be required to contribute 5% of their Canadian revenues to support the domestic broadcasting system
Canada has a long history of mandating a certain amount of attention and money goes toward supporting Canadian content.
This seems entirely consistent with that.
In the past they were able to leverage Federal control over the airwaves to achieve this (eg. selling off spectrum) but with the internet they need to come up with new revenue models to achieve the same levels of support for Canadian content.
Taking it to court might help. If it doesn't, maybe the US federal government can intervene.
Like let's be honest here, these companies only make money because of an onerous protection racket that was lobbied for by the likes of the RIAA and MPAA.
Canada is just deciding that they want their cut. That's all it is. There's no good guy here.
As an aside, weakening copyright law sufficiently would strongly accelerate democratic AI because AI thrives on high quality data.
What court? Last time I checked Canada was a sovereign country.
Regardless, this seems to be a form thing.
Also, I am quite sure that the law is a bit more formal than cannot collect unfair taxes (in what case, all taxes collected on me are unfair, but taxes collected on them are fair)
Like my attention has a monetary value to meta (eg. To expose me for ads), equally so has all the attention of the citizens of a country.
This is just the new generation of protectionism and toll.
If those american media platforms (for which there are no local equivalents) want my canadian dollars, I'm ok with them having to re-invest some of that locally.
Foreign streamers must pay into fund to boost Canadian content, CRTC says
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-online-streaming-ser...
Just like VAT increases are not quickly followed by price increases
A myth.
The myth is that a VAT increase (for instance, 7% => 10%, a couple of years ago) would shrink the business' margins : for 100€ paid by the customer, 93€ used to go to the business before the change, and only 90€ would go after the change.
Of course, and this is a massive surprise, all prices increased : the product now costs 110€, with 99€ going to the business and 11€ as VAT
So yeah, I'm pretty sure I know how my taxes work. That said, I can only speak about here in France, as I do not know how it works in other countries.
They likely already charge what the market will bear, to maximizing revenue, such that increasing the price lowers revenue. Raising the price by 5% as a straight pass-through means lowering total revenue. Depending on the elasticity, the consumer price change could be 0 (assuming no one will pay for a higher price), but is almost certainly less than 5%.
Companies will sometimes overtly pass a cost on to the consumer in the hopes of creating political pressure against that cost. For example take a look at your phone or cable bill and how they itemize every tax and fee they have to pay and pass along to you.
If one of those taxes were removed, do you think the overall cable bill would actually go down, and stay down?
The Liberals under Trudeau is losing badly and will lose the next election. When the Conservatives and Poilievre come to power next election, they will cancel it for sure. Then the Liberals can attack Poilievre and the Conservatives for being anti-minority, anti-aboriginal and anti-French (where the money is suppose to go).
Why do you think the buy back for the assault style weapons is being pushed back to the election? Poilievre and the Conservatives will cancel the buy back. The Liberals will attack saying the Poilievre and Conservatives are pro-gun nuts and are anti-women (banning guns is huge in Quebec due to École Polytechnique massacre).