The Return Of Dumb Ideas: A Broadband Tax To Save Failing Newspapers
from the make-it-go-away dept
RobW points us to an opinion piece over at The Guardian, by David Leigh, who argues that there should be a £2 tax on every broadband connection sent to newspapers in order to prop them up for their own failures to adapt to a changing market place. He tosses out the usual tropes about how only newspapers can do real investigative reporting (what, like hacking voicemails the way Rupert Murdoch's journalists did?). Of course this is a complete myth. First of all, most newspapers do very little investigative reporting -- and UK papers are also somewhat famous for their ability to stretch the truth at times. Is this really something we want to reward?The idea is hardly original. It's been suggested for years and seems to pop up in random places at random times. While it may be more reasonable than taxing Google to fund newspapers, it's still a horrifically bad idea. Leigh tries to work out how this would work, arguing that the sum would be divvied up among UK newspapers based on their web traffic. Of course, how you measure web traffic suddenly becomes very, very important. Leigh seems to assume this is easy, and that any such system wouldn't be gamed -- which it would. On top of that, he fails to recognize that the second you base such a huge sum of potential money on purely one metric, news sites would optimize solely on that metric, even if they're not "gaming" the system. So, expect plenty of attempts at sensationalistic stories and the like, rather than the thoughtful investigative reporting he thinks they're going to get.
And how do you define who gets access to the money in the first place? Leigh thinks he has that worked out too... but he does not:
There would be no insuperable problems in defining "news providers". The starting point would be to designate those organisations already classed by the state as zero-rated newspapers under the 1994 VAT legislation : "Newspapers … issued at least once a week in a continuous series under the same title … [which] contain information about current events of local, national or international interest. Publications which do not contain a substantial amount of news are not newspapers."Ok, so that starts out by favoring the very companies who have done the least to adapt to changing times and ignores upstarts who have worked hard to build audiences and business models that work. And then you have to "apply" to get access in a long bureaucratic process where a small group of people (probably pulled from newspapers) gets to pick and choose? That's not how you build innovative companies with innovative business models. And, really, why the ban on "content aggregators"? There is this ongoing argument among old school newspaper people who seem to think that "aggregators" are the enemy -- despite the fact that they send original news sites more traffic and more users, and many aggregators expand into original content production themselves as well. Either way, lots of news sites would start applying, just because there's a ton of cash sitting there, and they'd all just start trying to optimize for the metric to get in.
Other original news providers could subsequently apply to the independent levy board for admission to the scheme, case-by-case. But there would have to be a reasonable size threshold for admission, perhaps set at 100,000 monthly users, and also some rules to exclude content aggregators.
But, of course, the real problem with all of this is the idea that it ever makes sense to tax a new technology to prop up those who failed to innovate, failed to adapt and couldn't compete. If they can't do it, let them fail. Contrary to Leigh's rather myopic view of the world, others will come in to fill the need, and they'll do so with innovative business models that don't require a tax. Really, Leigh's piece is best summed up by the first comment, from user "romandavid" who noted:
"A £2-a-month levy on automobiles could save our horse and cart business."Exactly. If this got approved, every other disrupted industry would seek the same thing. Record labels? Movie studios? You bet. Travel agents? Absolutely. Really, what industry wouldn't want to add their own "tax" to the internet to try to pretend that we still lived in the 1980s? Thankfully, nearly all of the comments on the article seem to be taking the same general stance, that Leigh's idea is completely ridiculous and self-serving, without any reason or merit.
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Filed Under: broadband tax, newspapers, tax, uk
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.....isnt around anymore,look at the 10 steps from the communism manifiso, and tell me how many of them have been completed w/ nil public support and compete bipartisan support in such as way that the commies wouldnt be happy about (im looking at u fed reserve)
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This is a right wing attempt to confiscate wealth from people and give it to business.
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either prove that wrong or stop making this a stupid left/right namecalling fight
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But but, I hear a lot about the horrible things those lefties and lib-rals are up to ...
Are you uber riche? - Are you a pathological liar? - If you answered yes to these questions, you may have a bright future as a politician.
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Either a) you're flat-out telling the people who make the rules, "get us money or you're cut off" or b) the people who make the rules think, "uh oh, if they fail, we lose our money!" and the end result is weekend-at-burnies'ing companies which should just go away.
Well, either that, or it's a bunch of people who have no understanding of the internet and think something of value is lost if the old newspapers go away.
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Nobody wants to be guaranteed a profit - only the right to seek one without interference by those who would attempt to profit unjustly from your efforts.
It's an amusing quote from a man that was fairly out of touch even in his day.
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The media companies' actions are a lot more convincing than your words, and they're not saying the same thing.
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Some facts which may or may not be relevant
It is about 12th in national circulation figures (with 1/10th of the leader) but apparently has the second most visited website of UK newspapers.
Just a few facts which might, or might not be relevant, to his suggestions.
On the other hand, The Guardian does at least try to do journalism, unlike some of its competitors which are more interested in securing readers/page views than actually investigating things; the Daily Mail, 2nd in circulation,and most visited news site (iirc in the world) has a top article at the moment on someone's account of how they were able to make money from a supermarket's voucher scheme, and their top side story is about some celebrity's dress splitting open at the Emmys (with pictures, of course). Still, at least we have the BBC.
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Re: Some facts which may or may not be relevant
Considering the fact that Cameron and co. have a much ingrained hatred of the service, I wouldn't count on that being around forever.
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Re: Some facts which may or may not be relevant
So what you're saying is the people have spoken and they are more interested in super market voucher schemes than whatever the Guardian has to offer.
Got it. The Guardian must be incredibly boring.
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Re: Some facts which may or may not be relevant
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I'd drop internet.
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Statism
June 8th, 2012, President Obama said, “…the Private sector is doing fine, where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy has to do with state and local government…” YouTube
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Re: Statism
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while on the otherhand the state can take control of some very very core levels of the market, like its currency, peoples incomes, subitys, and flat out price increasing; and then sells the rulebook to the highest bidder,
it was the government stealing to rule book from nature and putting it up for sell, not nature giving its book to the government
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Care to elaborate?
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US internet sucks
A quick google translates that to $24.29
I pay Comcast $69.99 for a "good broadband connection".
Time for me to go into my corner and pout about how much I pay for the only viable option I have for internet....
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=P
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Taxes for Everyone. Hooray!
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j/k =P
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“If we were merely dealing with the law of averages, half of the events affecting our nation's well-being should be good for America. If we were dealing with mere incompetence, our leaders should occasionally make a mistake in our favor. We . . . are not dealing with coincidence or stupidity, but with planning and brilliance.” -grey allen
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Re: Taxes for Everyone. Hooray!
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Starting a newspaper myself now
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Best line in the article...
well put "A scheme"
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Most of them prefer to do what I called edited reporting. I was part of a group years ago that would routinely compare and analyze high profile news stories from a wide variety of news outlets, and it was quite fascinating to see how frequently the more independent and unaffiliated news agencies, or independent bloggers would have more generally well rounded and inclusive stories, and how often the larger news agencies would add or omit certain details depending on how they wanted to spin the story.
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Fire Cooked vs. Sushi
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The Theatre??
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Re: The Theatre??
If you count panto (ugh!) then a lot of other people use it as a vehicle to stay 'relevant' when they aren't able to be splashed all over the gossip pages...
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One of my personal faves is putting a tax on gas to support public transit. It is possibly the most self-defeating tax in the world, because if it encourages people to drive less and instead take the subsidized public transit, there will in facr be less money to subsidize the public transit - because less gas was sold.
There are certainly enough people who feel that the print media business is significant enough and important enough to merit protection and support. It's perhaps one of the best cases where they can see the loss of information and news, and realize that there is little to replace it. Remember, most websites depend on the print news as sources of their own content. This story is based on a piece from the Guardian (print paper).
While the public and advertisers may not be supporting print journalism directly, they do profit from it all the time. A tax like this, while appearing to be regressive, may in fact be supporting what is good for the public.
See Mike, it's not always just about numbers. Sometimes you have to go looking at the larger cause and effect to see what may be going on.
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This is the problem with levies like these--it isn't about funding journalism--it's about propping up failing print newspapers; two entirely different things that the print newspapers keep trying to conflate.
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What you have a is a problem of delivery versus source.
Too much of the internet (including Techdirt, Wired, and other popular internet sites) base the content of their sites on "reported in this newspaper" or "according to that newspaper". It seems that for the most part, only the print people are actually doing very much work to get the news, aside from what falls on their head.
Television? Burning building, film at 11! The most in depth for most TV news is how big the weather girl's cleavage is.
So there really is a problem; Most of the journalism being done is for the print media (newspapers, magazines, reviews, journals, etc), and most of the places people go to read it are sponging off of them.
So you could give a ton of money to internet sites, but you wouldn't have more material, because they would be losing their sources.
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according to this or that news source ......
and then provides the actual data which is quoted in said news source as supporting silly/stupid/criminal plan and shows why it doesn't do anything of the kind.
So, yeah, without certain news sources techdirt in particular would have less to write about, but then they wouldn't need to be writing it because the disinformation wouldn't be out there in the first place.
Because everyone knows that despite there being no valid figures demonstrating any harm from piracy, piracy is a problem that needs to be tackled with enhanced legislation massively increased enforcement.
Everyone knows that more people have lost work in the movie industry due to piracy, than have ever worked in the movie industry from it's inception until today and that more money is lost to the music industry yearly due to piracy than the cumulative total money made by the music industry from the birth of recorded music until today.
Record box takings year after year are the ultimate proof that cams are killing cinema and despite massive ticket price hikes the movie industry has not totally eliminated the audiences.
Something must be done.
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according to this or that news source ......
and then provides the actual (or made up--depends on what will sell more papers/magazines--you'd have to put the paper/magazine down to check the sources online) data which is quoted in said news source (if they feel like telling you they got this somewhere else) as supporting silly/stupid/criminal plan and shows why it doesn't do anything of the kind.
So, yeah, without certain news sources printed news media in particular would have less to write about, but then they wouldn't need to be writing it because the disinformation wouldn't be out there in the first place.
All news media works this way.
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Or..I don't know...maybe they could get their own sources and create their own material with that money. And they'd probably be more efficient at it too. Where do you think print journalists get their story ideas from? Press releases, tips from other journalists and insiders, wire service stories, do you think these will all disappear if the newspapers fail? I doubt it.
Yes, historically journalism has been done for print media, but throwing tax dollars at print media isn't going to solve the problem of no one wanting dead tree newspapers. If you want to fund journalism fund journalists, not dead tree newspapers. Or better yet let the market sort itself out. If people value quality journalism, some one will find a way to profit from it. As much as print newspapers did? Probably not--but they'll be a hell of a lot less waste. Don't waste our money propping up an inefficient system merely because that's the way we always did it.
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no tax needed
- paid advertisement
- subscription(paywall) to remove ads
- subscription(paywall) grants acess to the full stories of investigative journalism (nonpaying customers only get to see the first paragraph of those, while the copy/paste headlines remain free for all to attract traffic)
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Total twaddle
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