Krisztus, micsoda seggfej.
Focusing on corporate tax rate tells only half the story and leaves the impression that the people are being exploited for the benefit of companies. It’s not clear that’s the case. Hungary also has a very low personal tax rate - flat 16%. Consumption taxes apply to corporations and people. In the view of many economists low (or no) income tax rates and higher consumption taxes are a better model than high income taxes.
High consumption tax also makes a stronger case for black markets to pop up. If you’re paying or trading under the table then there is no tax.
This will make cloud services way more expensive to use. Which may be the only good aspect I can see on the whole thing.
Oh, one more possible good. So massive wave of opposition that the govt backpedals on this crap with the comical speed of hastily retreating Keystone Kops, and will not try anytime soon again. One of the few good uses of Internet Outrages.
Consumption tax on data. What next? Tax on breathing? Tax on sunlight?
Most likely that the Hungarian government just hates the internet and the power it brings to people. This tax is a way to ‘shut off’ the internet. Just at the tax on advertisement income, which targeted just the commercial (non state owned) TV station RTL. The European Commision is looking into this: Media freedom remains under threat in Hungary with quite strong language.
The country also has a problem in that the constitution allows itself to be changed by a single government. And the current government is (ab)using that.
UPDATE - Pro-government trolls reported the Facebook event organized for the anti-internet tax protest on Sunday, so organizers had to start new event… Wonder, how FB staff / moderators can be so easily manipulated?
How does one set up a black-market for internet data?
In some areas, you can also get some wireless across the border. If you have a direct visibility and have a friend at the other end, Bob’s your uncle. Doesn’t even have to be a friend; I can imagine ISPs in Slovakia and around other borders to happily take their share of customers. With a better antenna, maybe even 3G could work.
Then there’s the satellite internet, with high-speed high-latency downlink and low-speed local-internet uplink; these services existed some time ago, not sure how/if they work now and how much they cost.
Is there a tax on sending a file over my local network, from one PC to another?
What about from my apartment to the one next door?
What about to the building next door?
What about over a microwave link between my office building and our satellite campus?
What counts as internet, and what’s local?
we will use the wifi networks of our neighbo…uring countries?
…if the goal is to crush the poor, increase unemployment, and empower aristocracy.
A friend of mine has just had their FB account fucked with like this; the suspicion is that it’s because they a: just had an interview with John Barker formerly of the Angry Brigade on their podcast, and b: were very vocally raising funds for Palestinian medical aid. There have been myriad spurious complaints leading to admins being locked out and their previous page being completely deleted.
This is not new ,anyone can get pretty much any facebook page deleted and unless that page deletion gets picked up by some big sites or news media , you can shout all you want , you wont get that page back …
Hosanna in the highest, blessed be the Holy Cloud!
…now, how to have the networking benefit of face-bleh and the stability/portability of standalone hosting independent on a service… would some sort of self-owned URL shortener, where you can link at third-party servers and move them around if shutdown comes? The page itself is then less critical to shut down as your listeners can have RSS feeds from off-facebook once they visit and subscribe them, the shortener service is also less critical as it only acts as an alias, and the blog hosting itself can be done on several services at once, especially if the content is synced automatically. Still not perfect, but what is…
Oh, aye, that’s more or less what they’ve done, it’s just annoying dickery, and FB ought to pay more bloody attention to malicious reports, but then, it ought to do a lot of things…
FB is a scourge. If it was on fire, I’d bring two bottles - one of champagne, one of gasoline.
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