Hungarian Prime Minister Abandons Internet Tax - The UpStream

Hungarian Prime Minister Abandons Internet Tax

posted Saturday Nov 1, 2014 by Scott Ertz

We've seen Internet taxes proposed across the world before, but they infrequently get implemented and the ones that do infrequently last. This is the case in Hungary, whose proposed Internet tax has officially been abandoned. The Primi Minister, Victor Orbán, made the announcement following protests in the tens of thousands of participants were held across the country.

The abandonment, however, comes with a caveat: he said that there will be no Internet tax in this form, not that the concept of some sort of Internet tax was being abandoned. This means that the Hungarian people will not see a $0.62 per gigabyte of used bandwidth, but could still see some sort of tax applied in the future.

The concept of a bandwidth-based tax on wired connections is especially offensive. Here in the office, on an average week, we consume several hundred gigabytes of bandwidth just in Hulu and Netflix usage. It is not unusual to run 6 or more hours of video streaming per day; assuming full HD (~8GB per hour), that is 336 GB per week, or $208.32 in additional taxes under the abandoned plan. That is just for the usage via streaming services, not our Internet usage as a whole.

As the usage of Internet is increasingly video-based, and the quality available from these services increases, that number would only go up. Because of this, it is a great move for the government to abandon the plan in this form. A new plan could be formed in January 2015, as the government is planning a national consultation on the topic.

Either way, it is good to see the government listened to its people. The protesters celebrated their victory Friday night, following their success story with another street gathering.

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