Ask HN: Would This Work?

What if a government assigned a very small % of income tax to "tech_services" for each citizen. It could be further subdivided into categories (social, communications, media).

Then when a user of a social media site, non-ad generating search engine, news site, email client, chat app etc wanted to register, they could oauth-style authenticate to the tax office and assign a % of these funds to a particular service.

The data/advertising driven business models online grow due as everyone likes free and ads are a great way to monetise a free service. Since a citizen has already "paid" their tax it's still effectively a free service for them. Why not spend it?

Depending on the implementation it could also be used to subsidise smaller or more socially impactful services (eg gov directly subsidizes lower income people to use more expensive services). Its also possible to support user pricing models to be based on income.