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How do you say “astounding stupidity” in Hungarian? It appears the government in Hungary wants to ensure than there is essentially no significant IT sector within their borders, with all the knock on joys to a modern economy that will bring.
Hungary’s government plans to levy a new tax on Internet data transfers, according to the draft 2015 tax bill submitted to parliament late on Tuesday, which could hit Internet providers and the country’s telecommunications companies.
The draft tax code contains a provision for Internet providers to pay 150 forints (60 US cents) in tax per gigabyte of data traffic, but would also allow companies to offset corporate income tax against the Internet tax.
To tax data is like subsidising idiocy by taxing insight. All states do amazingly stupid things but this one is a real doozy.
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Quite so Perry.
This is insane!
oh…and pedant alert: Shouldn’t that be: ‘Duesy’ ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duesenberg
Wow. Are you sure? Is this right? Wow.
It is spelled Doozy
I mean I can buy a 2TB hard disk for 80 pounds but it would cost me 740 to fill it up over an Internet link.
A two hour movie would cost GBP 6.35 in tax to stream (at 10Mbps)!
60 cents per Gb is about three times what I pay for data at the moment. A 300% tax?
Taxing 1s and 0s, soon they’ll have 0.
But nearby in the Ukraine, a similar malady is in the air, taxing private gas producers at 55%.
Let Putin sort them out, if they are that crazy.
How easy will tax evasion be in this case? Seems pretty simple to me…
3 points occur:
1–This will be got around anyway and will cost them the Devil to enforce. Hungary is an increasingly nasty state but that is also true for all the rest of them. They all sense their power is slipping and are making more and more grabs to try and hang onto it.
2-Hungary is in the EU. I don’t know but would have thought that there may exist some kind of EU regs on such matters. This maybe an occasion where the EU can serve as a useful idiot for the cause of freedom.
3- It is past time a new Internet is needed–one that can operate beyond the reach of the state.
Mr Ecks makes a good point about the EU, it can actually restrain the nuttier types. In the UK, in the 1990s, M. Delors the (French) President of the Commission got a rousing reception when he addressed the Trades Union Congress, and that was the point at which the Left in the UK saw the EEC/EU not as a brake on their ambitions to impose socialism, but as a throttle, and hence fell in love with what had up to then been a poor alternative to the (by then vanished) Soviet Union.
Though I fear that the EU will look at this and simply see it as their tax to impose, not the nation states’.
So now we have “Hungary, the world’s biggest notspot”.
Expect satellite providers to make a killing on this one.
Literally, that would be “Hihetetlen butasag,” but more loosely translated, “Hihetetlen ez a kurva kormány.”
Today, of course, Orban went to a Siemens plant to brag about making jobs for the future in manufacturing.
From the article it describes the operation of Hungary’s current telecommunications tax on voice calls:
I would expect the data transfer tax to operate similarly.
Is it a bit of reverse psychology? With the voice call tax there is apparently a very small monthly allowance of a few minutes that go untaxed and after that you get taxed on your phone calls. With data what is likely to happen – that users will try to manage the cost of their downloads to be as low as possible or, if the maximum monthly tax is low enough, will they think ‘sod it I’ll just blow through the lot and accept the increased cost’? Could there be a level of data transfer tax where it might actually encourage uncapped broadband take up in Hungary?
And this is a country that bans Communist symbols?
ISPs will provide radio access just across the boarder like Canada provided alcohol during the Great Leap Forward in organised crime in Seppoland
Regional is absolutely on to something. There is money to be made setting up wireless access just across the border.
Whether it is ‘gotten around’, evaded ( due to unforseen
enforcement ‘impossibilities’ ), ignored etc. etc. never forget that there is NO boundary, limit or restraint on the hunger that government – ANY government – has for YOUR MONEY !!
They will tax your breathing and asphyxiate you for non-payment if they can get away with it !!
Hungary is one of the worst offenders. It’s nearly impossible to get ahead in life without either being a VERY clever entrepreneur, or else cheating like hell on taxes.
I’m not so much amazed they’re trying to tax data transfers. Governments tax everything they can, after all. But I am amazed at the amount they want to charge. It’s probably an order of magnitude more than it needs to be to shut down the internet in that country.
Russ, I put your more loosely translated version into Google Translate.
🙂
Interesting that Bing Translate doesn’t understand “butasag”, but Google Translate does. (And that both understand “kurva” !)
The tax appears to have been cancelled (well, for now).
Obviously the way to cook the lobster is the ‘slow’ approach, rather than a sudden immersion.