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Comment by mironathetin | Hacker News Reader

I agree, the previous system was bad. It has been replaced by a system that is also bad. Even worse, this one can be attacked in court because it is obviously unfair.

This is the only situation I know, where a company distributes their product for free and then asks everybody to pay for it. This is a special situation of course, because the public broadcasting has the official task to educate and report in a neutral way. This is welcome - no doubt.

But the presence in the internet and thus on computers is no excuse to collect money from everybody. In contrary, the presence of the internet allows to measure exactly, who is using the services. In a few years from now, perhaps even today, it would be possible to do the same with the wireless receivers, like TV.

So it would be easy to charge the households who use the service. No GEZ needed any more, but a fair system that charges for usage.

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No. The way it's supposed to work is if you can access is, you've got to chip in. It's not supposed to be based on actual usage. In a manner of speaking, it's supposed to be available to everyone, even if no one was watching it.

You're not suggesting a strict improvement but a change, and a drastic one at that (essentially equivalent to a privatization), and I imagine you'd need a national two-thirds majority to change the constitution to implement it. I might be wrong about that, I don't know how much leeway there is regarding the implementation.

Just think of it as a tax, as essentially that's what it is, just a special one that bypasses the government to make it more difficult for them to exert influence on public broadcasting.

Why not just get rid of the state owned propaganda channels? Why is that never an option. It's absurd to have to be subjected to state propaganda and be made to pay for it. Brainwashing should be free, no?

Getting rid of the state owned propaganda channels is not an option because they're not exactly state owned nor are they propaganda channels.

And I'm not sure why I am supposed to prefer the brainwashing provided to me free by private channels -- free as in I pay for it once with further concentrated brainwashing in 3 minute segments and then once more when I pay the obligatory surcharge on everything because the money for those ads has to come from somewhere.

The basic idea was to have a channel that is neither state nor privately owned. This is why the fee is actually not a real tax, the collecting agency is not a federal agency and explains some other idiosyncrasies in the system.

It worked out somewhat ok. I'd say it's better than the Italian or the French system, but far from perfect. Separation from the government could be stronger, ... All in all I'd prefer to keep and fix it over abandoning the split and turning it all over to a private player or the government.

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