The stupidity of European politicians is that extreme, it cannot be explained away by assuming a lack of education. I was never a conspiracy theorist, but the discrepancy between "That's something an educated person should understand" and what they are actually doing is that large I cannot bridge it mentally.
This may be a defect of mine, it probably is, but I have no but.
If you’re an American, the only news you hear from Europe is clickbait peddled by American journalists. Day-to-day politics in European countries doesn’t affect Americans, so it isn’t reported on. Journalists in Europe pay excess attention to American school shootings and Texas’ decades-long struggle to successfully administer the death penalty for the same reasons.
>And foreigners not in the know are about to get whalloped for $1000 extra around the ring road.
Which is probably the point (same with the hotel tax), if I had to guess? I mean Iceland gets a lot of tourists, and they have no obligation to provide free roads to everyone. In fact, they have a beautiful country, so if they can, they should capitalize on it. How is this a proof that "The stupidity of European politicians is that extreme, it cannot be explained away by assuming a lack of education" (the original claim)? They're doing their job.
I don't have an X account, so I can't see the conversation, but there don't appear to be any carveouts for non-profits or small businesses in the amendment, unless perhaps "any company offering an internet access service to households and businesses" has more criteria in context than a simple reading would suggest.
I wonder how distribution via torrent would be accounted for. Or if it would be worth it for larger players to adopt such a model, or just pay up or exit France.
I haven't done french since high school. So totally chatgpt and google translate reading this to me, but I really don't get what VideoLAN has to do with this.
The law is crazy with a €55/TB tax on ingress to France (including local cdns). But it's got nothing to do with your video player.
> A tax is established based on the flows of digital data emitted by content providers and paid by the latter
> When a data emitter uses a content delivery network to cache content near end users, the amount of data emitted is considered equal to the sum of the outgoing flows from the delivery network
Imagine paying €8 to download Balder's gate 3 lol.
the text menstions several times that internet providers are the one in charge of collecting and paying the tax, i don't see how the softwares enabling the streaming/download would be under threat?
I think the key terms to note here are: "content and applications providers" (translation mine). The law seems to only apply to those companies producing both, which should leave VideoLan out of the picture. French can be a bit ambiguous sometimes (as English maybe), here there are 2 possible readings in French:
- content providers and application providers
- providers of both content and applications
I don't think that the first interpretation has a leg though, because of the remaining of the text.
Laffer curve is about percentages (and also irrelevant below 80-90% and irrelevant if you think government shouldn't be a business). Taxing people with zero money millions of dollars isn't even on the curve, it's just a completely separate bad thing.
The separate internet tax on the other hand, that's about 1000% of the cost of internet, and a 1000% tax is definitely on the wrong side of the laffer curve. They are essentially banning the internet.
The laffer curve is the law of diminishing returns applied to taxation revenues. It is relevant anywhere the government cares about tax revenues rather than being punitive or arbitrary, and its effects depend on the item being taxed and the effect this has on the wider economy.
What if you're paying a few EUR a month for unlimited streaming on some app, not high profit new movies? The profit they make per episode for some rerurn of some old show you binge is probably a few cents at best.
Video streaming platforms are not generally running on a pay-per-view monetization model. A few offer this, but the vast majority of them are offering it at $15-20/months for unlimited streaming. 4K video uses quite a bit of bandwidth. Low end is something like 15Mbps. That’s ~7GB/hour. Or, $0.385/hour at these proposed rates. Doesn’t take long to start approaching the cost of the streaming services charge.
And for households with kids, it's easy to imagine that turning into 30 hours a month, or $12 by your reasonable estimate. That's not a huge number, but I'm sure that'd push almost any streaming service into negative territory. I don't know what the average service's profit margins are, but highly doubt any of them could absorb that kind of hit.
Not just video streaming. Think of game downloads, software updates, video calls, cloud storage, backups.
A GTA 6 download is estimated to be 210 GB. Under this law the publisher or storefront will have to pay an extra 11.5 EUR per copy in tax. And not just for a sale, but for every download.
It's extremely common that when a right wing government transitions to a left wing government, the left wing government notices it has insane unpayable debt and tries a bunch of desperate things to repay it.
Mamdani had the same problem but was luckily able to negotiate practicable payment plans on NYC's debt.
Also I believe it's much easier to solve well intentioned stupidity than to solve malice.
You do realise the same is true for moves from the left to the right? The left spends until the coffers are empty, gets voted out by those fed up with the miserable state of the economy, the right takes over and brings things back on track through austerity measures, the economy wakes up but austerity is still demanded due to the size of the mess left by the lefties. Those same lefties point at the blooming economy and complain that only the rich get to profit while we live in austerity, vote for us and everyone gets a free beer and pony. People vote the left in, they start spending like crazy until the cycle repeats. Been there, seen it happen several times.
> It's extremely common that when a right wing government transitions to a left wing government, the left wing government notices it has insane unpayable debt and tries a bunch of desperate things to repay it.
Meanwhile the right wing opposition keeps pointing fingers and telling that it's the left's (or center's, whatever) fault. Happened multiple times.
> It's extremely common that when a right wing government transitions to a left wing government, the left wing government notices it has insane unpayable debt and tries a bunch of desperate things to repay it.
They both often continue increasing deficits and spending until they can't.
> Mamdani had the same problem but was luckily able to negotiate practicable payment plans on NYC's debt.
The last right-wing mayor was Bloomberg (I don't know how right-wing Bloomberg really is when he tried running as a Democrat), and that was 13 years ago.
> Also I believe it's much easier to solve well intentioned stupidity than to solve malice.
Well-intentioned stupidity can go on for far longer because people won't want to intervene because of a negative perception when intervening. If there is malice, there isn't a negative perception when intervening.
Please stop pressing that down-vote button on anything outside the desired narrative. What nbajka says is true, corruption is universal. It is also true worldwide, not just in Europe. Corruption knows no ideological boundaries. Power corrupts, politics is about power, those in power sometimes abuse it. Yes, right-wing politicians are sometimes as corrupt as left-wing politicians. Yes, left-wing politicians are sometimes as corrupt as right-wing politicians. There's corrupt centrists as well.
Drop the labels, preferred victim groups and excuses for your preferred ideology, heap everything together and you're getting closer to the truth:
My big fear about politicians is corruption, authoritarian tendencies and stupidity
There, done, put a pin in it. There's corrupt politicos on all sides of the spectrum, there's authoritarians on all sides and stupidity seems to be endemic.
Why do left-wing politicians always get given an out when they do malicious stuff, but the right doesn't? I think all politicians are lying and corrupt scumbags.
I find it astounding that people can apply different rules to one group of politicians because they say things they like. I hold them all to the same standard; I assume they are lying and corrupt until proven otherwise.
Couldn't they just admit the problem with capitalism is that you run out of other people's money, and then stop giving all the money to billionaires, and then there'd be enough money? The french government is who decided the french government has to pay all that money, they can just decide differently.
Quite terrifying that this appears to be a sincere comment. The top marginal tax rate on French nationals including CEHR is over 55%. The country spends ~60% of its GDP, almost 10% higher than the European average, let alone the average worldwide.
Could you elaborate how France is "giving all the money to billionaires"?
That's quite easy: billionaires are not contributing fairly and constantly evade taxation, thus concentrating more and more of the national added value.
That presumes billionaires have no agency and aren't at all responsible for the world we live in. It assumes they don't spend millions on political ads and lobbyists and politicians. That they aren't responsible for the actions their companies take. That private equity does the things they do and billionaires giving them money don't have a say in what they do. It assumes billionaires aren't meeting with other billionaires and making plans together or against each other.
So once you've milked the 43 French billionaires to extend French spending by 2.5 years or so (this assumes you extract 100% of their wealth into actual liquidity), what's your plan for year 3?
Quite terrifying that this appears to be a sincere comment. Do you really believe billionaires pay even near the top marginal rate? It’s well established that once you reach the very very top of fortunes, the effective tax rate starts going down.
If you're suggesting what I think you're suggesting (just stealing the public debt) the problem with that is
1) paying money to billionnaires cost 67B euros, let's say 10% more this year, to 73B (interest on debt so France can keep lending 170B more every year)
2) not paying money to billionnaires costs 170B euros (france needs 170B euros in new debt every year to balance the books)
Oh and of course when it does become worth doing, stealing the public debt, there is still the little matter of needing to get French people to do 250B worth of extra labor without paying them 1 cent extra (if they kick the can down the road, which they will, it should settle on about that amount per year). Essentially French people will have to work 1/6th harder one way or the other. But by paying billionnaires they can wait with that another 4 years.
Or, you know, they could work 1/30th extra now. 11 days per year. But that means not kicking the can down the road.
Similar figures for all EU countries (except Germany, for the moment at least), but they get to watch France solve it first because they're not the worst offender.
The proble. Is they dont do that. It is mostly going to retired pensioners. Now you have a conflict between the voting elderly masses and the workers paying taxes.
The billionaires are irrelevant. You could take every penny they have and it wouldn't make a difference
As the Europeans were forced to cut off cheap energy supply from Russia, it has really hurt some of their economies and it has partly contributed to the economic crisis emerging in EU. It is one of the major reasons why EU members are so opposed to ending the Ukraine war, despite their ally US pointing out that that horse (i.e. the proxy war) has been whipped for all its political worth and prolonging it anymore will likely backfire on the west (a defeat of Ukraine strengthens Russia, a defeat of Russia may result in nuclear war or further break up of it resulting in unrest and possibly civil war in that region, and any new breakaway nation states that form may possess nuclear weapons from the vast Russian nuclear arsenal). A "mini wartime" economy due to the Ukraine war is the only thing, some EU members feel, is sustaining their economy. And specifically, with respect to France, one of the major issue it has is that it never really gave up its imperialistic stake in its African colonies, which has been increasingly challenged by competition from China and Russia. As Africans increasingly assert their sovereignty, France is slowly being edged out in Africa. Even the Americans are now encroaching in Africa, on French influence, to retain western influence their and protect their access to African natural resources.
I mean, the law is stupid, but as one of the commenters there says, there is a 2% revenue (profit?) cap, and I don't think that VideoLAN makes a lot of revenue.
https://pastebin.com/zHkErGHP google translated version of article explains that the tax is not on any specific type of data but on any data delivered to french citizens/corps.
I don't have VideoLan's internal metrics, but if they're saying it'll cost them millions they're saying they deliver over ~18tb (or ~36tb for a tax of 2million) to french peeps per year
Because it's the actual generator of the bits that is supposed to pay. Which means you let a French person download anything at all, you're supposed to pay. If someone downloads your software from a mirror, the mirror can "identify you", and you'll be charged. No matter where you are.
This is supposed to let the French tax authorities collect 20B in additional tax revenue.
And yes, I don't see how Youtube (or Facebook, or Tiktok, or Netflix, or even something like Steam ...) can operate with such a tax in France.
If I upload to a french server from a ukranian server that I seed through a swiss based VPN using a norwegian seedbox that I paid a friend for in cash, how does the french government bill me? Do they subpoena the ukranian server to see where the data come from? Does the swiss government, not seeing any legal issue with my data, comply and hand over my norwegian server? Does the norwegian seedbox provider or my friend at the company foot the bill because they've no record of me?
What about networking stacks in which the requester can't necessarily identify where the data genuinely originated? Suppose I torrent a genuine Linux ISO in france. Do all of the peers get fractional bills? Or is it on the distro maintainer? What if the data didn't really originate from any of the peers but was fetched for me by the peers and the peers don't tell me (or therefore the ISPs) where they got the data from?
What if I put, say, VLC in an encrpyted zip. The ISP and therefore the french gov would see this as data coming from me since it doesn't hash as VLC, but they also can't prove that it came from me if I demonstrate that it was actually downloaded from a forum.
What about anonymous data? If 4chan is mirroring images for me that I uploaded from a McDonalds and a french frog downloads it, how do I get a bill? Does 4chan eat the bill or forward it to the McDonalds? Does the McDonalds eat the bill or hire a tech to cross-reference cameras and IP logs? What if I paid for the food in cash? Do they check some mythical "who owns this laptop" database provided by google/meta/microsoft? What if my laptop isn't in those databases? The local McDonalds is forced to foot the bill as they can't provide a patsie?
If I send a friend a video on via facebook messenger, who foots the bill? Facebook didn't send the data, I did. Is facebook going to rewrite it's eula to allow them to bill me for "woops your friend was in france at the time"?
This may all seem like hand-waving what-aboutism, but there are legitimate questions at hand. If public data is expensive and there are routes that do not result in billing, why would anyone choose the expensive route for any reason other than ignorance of the free route? If those who know would choose the free route, how is france going to collect all, most, or any of their booty?
This was expected. France is in a lot of debt trouble and it’s highly alarming development for Eurozone. Unlike the US, France cannot print more Euros to stay afloat and the ECB, who can, is institutionally hand-cuffed to not do so. Its chief just quit in a seemingly related situation but optically unrelated way.
Just to clarify: Christine Lagarde hasn't quit as in quit today, rather, she announced she will resign in February, 9 months before the end of her term.
This is the most hilarious thing I have ever read. Part of me wants this law to go into effect and watch an entry country send itself back to 1988 to try and compy with it.
France, like every EU country, is desperate to tax internet companies, because they can't currently. But, internet is largely ad-sponsored and even tiny taxes would destroy the business model.
The way this tax looks it just means you have to exclude French people from the internet. This won't work.
This is an exceedingly dumb tax. A more reasonable tax would be one for storing user data. That would make PII a liability, not something you hold on to forever in hopes of selling to some scammy third party when you fold.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 29.1 ms ] threadThis may be a defect of mine, it probably is, but I have no but.
I've been watching Iceland news, along with machine translation of Icelandic.
Right now, they're increasing taxes on parking, toll roads, 30% increase on hotels and B&B's, and per-kilometer driving tax.
It's insane the amount of taxes on taxes on taxes. And foreigners not in the know are about to get whalloped for $1000 extra around the ring road.
Sure, Iceland isn't EU proper. But they are Schengen along with other alliances. EU complaint stands, given they tax tax tax tax.
>Right now, they're increasing taxes on parking,
Great! Less car-centric infrastructure.
>toll roads
Great! Less cars.
>and per-kilometer driving tax
Great! Less cars on the road.
>And foreigners not in the know are about to get whalloped for $1000 extra around the ring road.
Which is probably the point (same with the hotel tax), if I had to guess? I mean Iceland gets a lot of tourists, and they have no obligation to provide free roads to everyone. In fact, they have a beautiful country, so if they can, they should capitalize on it. How is this a proof that "The stupidity of European politicians is that extreme, it cannot be explained away by assuming a lack of education" (the original claim)? They're doing their job.
I don't have an X account, so I can't see the conversation, but there don't appear to be any carveouts for non-profits or small businesses in the amendment, unless perhaps "any company offering an internet access service to households and businesses" has more criteria in context than a simple reading would suggest.
I wonder how distribution via torrent would be accounted for. Or if it would be worth it for larger players to adopt such a model, or just pay up or exit France.
This is the current one.
I haven't done french since high school. So totally chatgpt and google translate reading this to me, but I really don't get what VideoLAN has to do with this.
The law is crazy with a €55/TB tax on ingress to France (including local cdns). But it's got nothing to do with your video player.
> A tax is established based on the flows of digital data emitted by content providers and paid by the latter
> When a data emitter uses a content delivery network to cache content near end users, the amount of data emitted is considered equal to the sum of the outgoing flows from the delivery network
Imagine paying €8 to download Balder's gate 3 lol.
https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
the text menstions several times that internet providers are the one in charge of collecting and paying the tax, i don't see how the softwares enabling the streaming/download would be under threat?
- content providers and application providers
- providers of both content and applications
I don't think that the first interpretation has a leg though, because of the remaining of the text.
The separate internet tax on the other hand, that's about 1000% of the cost of internet, and a 1000% tax is definitely on the wrong side of the laffer curve. They are essentially banning the internet.
How so? If you're paying a few EUR to watch a movie there's should be plenty of profit left.
720p AV1 is about 700mb/hr, so about an order of magnitude less than your 7GB/hour.
It's not like a 720p limit for tax reasons is any worse than a 720p limit for lack-of-Widevine-support reasons.
A GTA 6 download is estimated to be 210 GB. Under this law the publisher or storefront will have to pay an extra 11.5 EUR per copy in tax. And not just for a sale, but for every download.
My big fear about left wing politicians is well intentioned stupidity.
Mamdani had the same problem but was luckily able to negotiate practicable payment plans on NYC's debt.
Also I believe it's much easier to solve well intentioned stupidity than to solve malice.
Meanwhile the right wing opposition keeps pointing fingers and telling that it's the left's (or center's, whatever) fault. Happened multiple times.
They both often continue increasing deficits and spending until they can't.
> Mamdani had the same problem but was luckily able to negotiate practicable payment plans on NYC's debt.
The last right-wing mayor was Bloomberg (I don't know how right-wing Bloomberg really is when he tried running as a Democrat), and that was 13 years ago.
> Also I believe it's much easier to solve well intentioned stupidity than to solve malice.
Well-intentioned stupidity can go on for far longer because people won't want to intervene because of a negative perception when intervening. If there is malice, there isn't a negative perception when intervening.
Also, left-wing governments are generally as corrupted and freedom-infringing as right-wing governments, at least in Europe.
My big fear about politicians is corruption, authoritarian tendencies and stupidity
There, done, put a pin in it. There's corrupt politicos on all sides of the spectrum, there's authoritarians on all sides and stupidity seems to be endemic.
As a leftist you don't have tobworry about comrades burning down your home.
I find it astounding that people can apply different rules to one group of politicians because they say things they like. I hold them all to the same standard; I assume they are lying and corrupt until proven otherwise.
The stuff they want to get done might suck though.
They are complete imbeciles on many other issues.
They have a deficit problem, they cannot print money and people really don't want to give up their pensions.
Unless the curb public spending they are heading to a hard crash (and will probably take a couple other economies for the ride).
Could you elaborate how France is "giving all the money to billionaires"?
They arent the ones driving up pensions for the retired, or instituting the anti-growth policies.
Like I said, kill every single one and the problem would still be there.
https://www.ipp.eu/publication/note-ipp-n92-quels-impots-les...
What do you mean when you say "capitalism"?
1) paying money to billionnaires cost 67B euros, let's say 10% more this year, to 73B (interest on debt so France can keep lending 170B more every year)
2) not paying money to billionnaires costs 170B euros (france needs 170B euros in new debt every year to balance the books)
Oh and of course when it does become worth doing, stealing the public debt, there is still the little matter of needing to get French people to do 250B worth of extra labor without paying them 1 cent extra (if they kick the can down the road, which they will, it should settle on about that amount per year). Essentially French people will have to work 1/6th harder one way or the other. But by paying billionnaires they can wait with that another 4 years.
Or, you know, they could work 1/30th extra now. 11 days per year. But that means not kicking the can down the road.
Similar figures for all EU countries (except Germany, for the moment at least), but they get to watch France solve it first because they're not the worst offender.
The billionaires are irrelevant. You could take every penny they have and it wouldn't make a difference
Which EU members feel that regarding a ""mini wartime" economy"? Where can I see that evidenced?
French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50308240
How can I see an English translation?
I don't have VideoLan's internal metrics, but if they're saying it'll cost them millions they're saying they deliver over ~18tb (or ~36tb for a tax of 2million) to french peeps per year
This is supposed to let the French tax authorities collect 20B in additional tax revenue.
And yes, I don't see how Youtube (or Facebook, or Tiktok, or Netflix, or even something like Steam ...) can operate with such a tax in France.
Who pays the tax in 'anonymous' p2p schemes?
If I upload to a french server from a ukranian server that I seed through a swiss based VPN using a norwegian seedbox that I paid a friend for in cash, how does the french government bill me? Do they subpoena the ukranian server to see where the data come from? Does the swiss government, not seeing any legal issue with my data, comply and hand over my norwegian server? Does the norwegian seedbox provider or my friend at the company foot the bill because they've no record of me?
What about networking stacks in which the requester can't necessarily identify where the data genuinely originated? Suppose I torrent a genuine Linux ISO in france. Do all of the peers get fractional bills? Or is it on the distro maintainer? What if the data didn't really originate from any of the peers but was fetched for me by the peers and the peers don't tell me (or therefore the ISPs) where they got the data from?
What if I put, say, VLC in an encrpyted zip. The ISP and therefore the french gov would see this as data coming from me since it doesn't hash as VLC, but they also can't prove that it came from me if I demonstrate that it was actually downloaded from a forum.
What about anonymous data? If 4chan is mirroring images for me that I uploaded from a McDonalds and a french frog downloads it, how do I get a bill? Does 4chan eat the bill or forward it to the McDonalds? Does the McDonalds eat the bill or hire a tech to cross-reference cameras and IP logs? What if I paid for the food in cash? Do they check some mythical "who owns this laptop" database provided by google/meta/microsoft? What if my laptop isn't in those databases? The local McDonalds is forced to foot the bill as they can't provide a patsie?
If I send a friend a video on via facebook messenger, who foots the bill? Facebook didn't send the data, I did. Is facebook going to rewrite it's eula to allow them to bill me for "woops your friend was in france at the time"?
This may all seem like hand-waving what-aboutism, but there are legitimate questions at hand. If public data is expensive and there are routes that do not result in billing, why would anyone choose the expensive route for any reason other than ignorance of the free route? If those who know would choose the free route, how is france going to collect all, most, or any of their booty?
ML algorithms trained on CIFAR are again commercially relevant.
The way this tax looks it just means you have to exclude French people from the internet. This won't work.
But to be fair, it's limited to what a "business" make as money. So it should exclude association (which are not allowed to make money in France).
But yes, it's really a stupid law.