Brits to pay phone tax to fund universal broadband
A major report by the British government has proposed a tax of £6 a year (approximately $10) for every telephone line to pay for extending broadband to every home in the country. It’s also told Internet providers they must cut illegal filesharing by as much as 80 percent to avoid being forced to take technical measures such as throttling.
The Digital Britain report includes a government commitment to have universal broadband of at least 2Mbps by 2012. (It defines universal as meaning such speeds are available in “virtually all” homes.) The government estimates that without intervention the market will only provide such speeds to two-thirds of the country by this time, mainly in highly-populated areas where it’s most profitable to upgrade lines.
To make up the difference, the government will collect an extra £150 million to £175 million in tax each year to subsidize upgrades to the telephone network and improve mobile broadband options in areas where fixed line broadband is least financially viable.
The tax will be collected as a 50 pence a month levy on line rental for copper landlines (in other words, it won’t affect fiber-optic cable customers). While many taxes in Britain are tied to specific activities carried out by particular groups – for example, tobacco taxes theoretically go towards healthcare provision, while road taxes supposedly fund road building – virtually everyone in the country rents a telephone line so it’s not clear why the money couldn’t simply be built into general taxation.
The report also puts the burden for tackling copyright infringement cases firmly back in the camp of Internet providers. The government plans to impose a legal duty on communications regulator Ofcom to clamp down on infringement. This will involve Ofcom having the power to force Internet providers to send warning letters to suspected offenders, and to put together data on how much illegal downloading goes on.
Ofcom will then compare the figures after six months and a year. If the figures do not show a drop “of the order of 70-80 percent” then it will be able to force firms to take further action such as blocking particular sites, capping the bandwidth of suspected offenders, or limiting access to particular types of Internet use such as peer-to-peer filesharing.
Once again the report cites inherently ludicrous claims that illegal filesharing costs the British music and TV/film industries £180 million and £152 million a year respectively. There’s no questioning of how the figures are produced, including the bogus assumption that anyone who downloads a pirated copy of an album or DVD would otherwise have paid the full retail price for a legitimate copy.
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