UK Commission Suggests Taxing Google To Prop Up Newspapers
from the tax-the-successes-to-prop-up-the-failures? dept
Earlier this year, we noted that France was considering a plan to tax Google to pay record labels. It looks like the UK has come up with a similarly bad plan for the newspaper industry, with a commission suggesting a tax on Google and other news aggregators, to help prop up newspapers. There doesn't seem to be much greater rationale, other than that old news publications are struggling and Google seems to be doing great, so why not tax them? The argument, of course, makes little sense. It's basically saying let's put a tax on the successful and give that money to the companies squandering it. Talk about a way to give the exact wrong message to companies, while making the economy that much more inefficient.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: journalism, newspapers, success, tax
Companies: google
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Of course someone will argue that news is important and we can't let the news industry die. Sure, news is important, which is why it will not die. Even if the current news industry dies, as people demand news, a new and more efficient industry will take its place.
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The same will be true of the news media industry. Although one medium may decline and eventually die off, relevancy of news never will. We will always need to be informed of relevant news, we will just get it from different places.
Interestingly, my local community news paper, delivered freely twice per week, recently added a third edition per week with a slightly different, more commercial market. While big, national papers are losing ground, smaller ones aimed at specific communities still are thriving.
I find that their focus on news within my community is more immediately relevant than the news provided by the national. Plus, they are chock full of flyers for local retailers and I find it hard to resist looking to see if there is a sale on produce.
It's all about relevancy. If a product is no longer relevant, it should change or cease to exist. Governments should not tax those that provide what the market desires in order to prop up those that do not. Let the big newspapers die if they cannot remain relevant.
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Sigh...
Why can't more people understand this extremely simple point? There are very few things that are served better by organized intrusion: environmental concerns, human rights issues, some limited oversights. But really, that's about it.
For a great many "issues", the best course of action in terms of intrusion is to simply not do anything at all. Let things sort themselves out. There's nothing intrinsically WRONG with a nation without newspapers. If that happened, it likely meant that they shouldn't exist any longer. Yet "news" as we mean it will continue, because there is a hunger for it....
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Plus the biggy - keeping the playing field level. This means preventing successful organisations from abusing their market power.
Unfortunately in recent years governments have shown a disturbing tendency to do the opposite (and this proposal is an example)
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When the government attempts to "level the playing field" as they do here or in most antitrust examples, they hurt consumers by increasing the cost associated with the best products and discouraging improvements past a certain point. It also serves as a harmful alternative to competition for many incumbents in that they can instead either be propped up or hurt their rivals via government protectionism - in turn incentivizing resources spent lobbying instead of improving or innovating.
Rewarding pro-consumer policies is quite obviously much, much better provided by the public than by government.
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You sound like a communist.
In a free market the playing field IS level. The problem is that the incumbents can not compete in a level playing field because they are failures. So instead of innovating they lobby the government to give them an unearned unlevel playing field whereby they can make money by being failures.
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and then
i say do it and google DO increased rates at exact amount that they tax ya....
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Need to tax the legislators
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What's the Difference?
Doesn't this describe nearly every tax anymore? It just looks like they've abandoned any hint of subtlety here, replacing the more general "rob rich people to pay poor people" with specifically "rob Peter to pay Paul". Pretty shameless...
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Re: What's the Difference?
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Re: What's the Difference?
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Reagan was right
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This is not how the market works
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I was thinking something similar. All google would have to do is stop aggregating news from the UK. no aggregation and no taxes.
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Hey Honey
"What is it dear?"
"I just got promoted at the newspaper. I'm in charge of Business De-Enterprise!"
"What's that?
"Basically, in the olden days, you had to work hard to make sure people bought your newspaper. You know, well-written articles, catchy headlines, advertising. Well, the government has just done something great. If a newspaper is strapped for cash, why they'll tax some completely unrelated company, for no reason that makes sense, and give us that money!"
"That's mad!"
"Yeah well, its great for me! I just have to make sure that we don't do a good job anymore! Let's see, I could edit things wrong, put in articles no-one wants to read. And once business drops off, well, off to the government I go!"
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as i said
THAT will do the world good and then those businesses relying on some ads can whine to the legislators.....
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The moral argument and Google Tax
So France has a corporate tax rate of 33.3%, and Ireland is 12.5%, so Google is saving quite a bit of money. Contrast that against the fact that Google is having a heavy impact on national ad markets, and you have to wonder if there's anything wrong with France wanting 1-2% back.
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Governments like to take money from the successful who innovate and give it to failures who refuse to adapt.
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Scholarship
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