Re: Finance the music industry with a $6/mo le vy on broadband (The Reg)

> Some people don't buy much or download any music. Me for instance.
I'm with you there.

> there's no way I'm going to contribute to propping up a failed
> business that I despise.
you have my sympathy there, too.

> Would you have paid extra road tax to subsidise DeLorean?

Through my various taxes I have always (though I travel by bike and
train) subsidised the use of road transport powered by internal
combustion engines (which are quietly destroying my upper respiratory
tract; it'll take 'til I'm past retirement before it has results worse
than over-vulnerability to colds and the like; and I quite like the
benefits our high-octane economy brings me, so I don't like to grumble
about it *too* much, but you can imagine I don't like subsidising it)
and (though only very briefly, as it all got privatised early in my
career) the British motor car industry.

Road tax isn't the only way we subsidise the roads.

Given a choice between
 * a cartel of large corporations controlling the roads by imposing
   tolls all over the place and
 * a modest increase in road tax to cover paying off those corporations
   for long enough to get the infrastructure less dependent on them
I'd vote for the latter.

The problem is we've *already* given the failed business that we despise
a mechanism (copyright, now bolstered by EUCD/DMCA) for levying
arbitrary taxes and imposing arbitrary regulations; replacing this with
a modest tax on connection might be an improvement.  Bear in mind that
we, who presently pay nothing for the service we don't use, are in
danger (unless we can head the cartel off at the pass) of ending up
having to pay extra for crippled consumer entertainment devices that
don't offer us the fluid power of our modern computers; we'll probably
find we can't even go browsing text-only information-rich web-sites by
our friends without the corporate pop-up ads intruding all the time, for
some bogus reason tied to the fact that we don't control our machines
any more, we're just using the corporations' device that we've paid to
have installed in our own homes.  The question is not "do we agree to
pay ?" but "which way of being screwed over are we going to endure ?".

All the same, I must confess I prefer the tax credit scheme I spotted
the other day.  It *does* rankle to be paying off extortionists ...

	Eddy.