It's amazing that this South Park clip just gets more and more true every year. "Canada wants more money! Other countries get lots of money, we want some of that money. How about the Internet? Internet makes lots of money!"
Same with some EU countries. They're full of parasite mafia-like organizations that have been given power by the state to just rent seek.
In Austria there's a tax on all devices with built-in storage, from phones to blank DVDs and external HDDs, because the association of movies and music IP holders claim digital storage is used to store pirated content so it's their way of clawing back revenue lost to piracy.
You can't make this up. That South Park skit is spot on for this country. I think there's similar taxes in other countries too.
We have the same law in France. They even tried to tax refurbished phones and computers (which were already taxed) but someone told them to fuck off on that kind of item.
In France, for every storage devices (USB stick included), for every smartphone (which has storage), even for GPS (related .. god knows how) : you pay a tax. Because of said device, you could store a file "shared" by somebody else (that is, a file you did not pay for).
You MUST pay the tax.
As such, I consider my right to store files "shared" by somebody else. I paid for it, ffs.
Wow what is Canada's end game here? First they tell the search engines. Engines they have to hand over part of their revenue to legacy media. Now they're going after all the streaming services. Like what is their actual end game? Rather than trying to do something to improve their own economic situation, their solution is just a parasitically leech off of other countries. Large businesses. I mean there's a case to be made for ensuring that massive conglomerates better than appropriate tax burden, but there's got to be a better way than just hamfistedly slapping arbitrary revenue numbers on every service offered in the country, especially when it's already more expensive than across the border. I guess what I'm really asking is who is John Galt?
> Major online streaming services operating in Canada will be required to contribute 5% of their Canadian revenues to support the domestic broadcasting system
Canada has a long history of mandating a certain amount of attention and money goes toward supporting Canadian content.
This seems entirely consistent with that.
In the past they were able to leverage Federal control over the airwaves to achieve this (eg. selling off spectrum) but with the internet they need to come up with new revenue models to achieve the same levels of support for Canadian content.
Canada's economy is kept afloat by inflating a housing bubble and playing all sorts of dirty tricks with taxes. Now that Mexico is taking a lot of Canada's business, Canada becomes less and less relevant to US, expect more of this shenanigans.
This was Trudeau/Freeland's idea of "getting back at the man for nafta 2"
I think his comment contains a speech-to-text error. I assume it is supposed to read "their solution is just a parasitically leech off of other countries' large businesses."
Doesn’t seem that different than the US government subsidizing US manufacturing and enacting tariffs on Chinese goods.
It’s a society trying to incentivize investment within the society, because the society’s products/services are not cost competitive with products/services from another society. If it is due to economies of scale, there is almost no way to incentivize that other than to penalize the outside products/services.
Canada and Europe are well known to engage in such mafia behaviors, seeking "protection money", in exchange for no real protection at all. If the companies pay now, they will only have to pay even more later.
Taking it to court might help. If it doesn't, maybe the US federal government can intervene.
What if Canada just decided that copyright protection on the type of material that America streaming companies make crazy profits from was only valid for 25 years?
Like let's be honest here, these companies only make money because of an onerous protection racket that was lobbied for by the likes of the RIAA and MPAA.
Canada is just deciding that they want their cut. That's all it is. There's no good guy here.
Well, that would be an amazing thing if Canada weakened copyright law. It's what differentiates good change from bad change. But I guess there is no honor among thieves (copyright cartel and Canada). Neither side is morally worth defending.
As an aside, weakening copyright law sufficiently would strongly accelerate democratic AI because AI thrives on high quality data.
Ah yes. We had license for public broadcasters tried in Denmark. Turned out that it resembled a tax. There is this law, that only the official tax agency can collect taxes, and now license for public broadcasting is collected over the tax.
Regardless, this seems to be a form thing.
Also, I am quite sure that the law is a bit more formal than cannot collect unfair taxes (in what case, all taxes collected on me are unfair, but taxes collected on them are fair)
I see a lot of american voices seemingly unaware of the reach and control of their platforms. I see nothing wrong with forcing them to support the creation of local content in countries where they operate (in order to extract wealth).
If those american media platforms (for which there are no local equivalents) want my canadian dollars, I'm ok with them having to re-invest some of that locally.
I see your POV, but at the same time, shouldn't Canada ask itself why it doesn't have a Netflix equivalent? American media reaches far, but it's made in the US. It's not really the US's fault that other nations aren't investing in making media that appeals to their culture such that another culture can take over.
Companies charge as much as they can, not how much it costs to produce plus fixed overhead.
They likely already charge what the market will bear, to maximizing revenue, such that increasing the price lowers revenue. Raising the price by 5% as a straight pass-through means lowering total revenue. Depending on the elasticity, the consumer price change could be 0 (assuming no one will pay for a higher price), but is almost certainly less than 5%.
> Companies charge as much as they can, not how much it costs to produce plus fixed overhead.
Companies will sometimes overtly pass a cost on to the consumer in the hopes of creating political pressure against that cost. For example take a look at your phone or cable bill and how they itemize every tax and fee they have to pay and pass along to you.
Yes, in a competitive market, but when the entire industry is hit with a new exogenous expense then this is much more likely to be passed on to customers.
I’d like to see a solid, peer reviewed study that states: in a normal, competitive market, business cost increases are not correlated with consumer price increases.
I mean, obviously they're going to be related. Even in a perfectly competitive environment, if everyone's costs increase then so will the going price. The operative question is whether these increased costs will be passed onto the consumer in their entirety, and that much isn't necessarily clear. If they do pass those costs on 100%, then it's a tacit admission that they weren't pricing in a profit-maximizing way before the cost increase.
Here in France, VAT is a tax collected by the business.
The myth is that a VAT increase (for instance, 7% => 10%, a couple of years ago) would shrink the business' margins : for 100€ paid by the customer, 93€ used to go to the business before the change, and only 90€ would go after the change.
Of course, and this is a massive surprise, all prices increased : the product now costs 110€, with 99€ going to the business and 11€ as VAT
So yeah, I'm pretty sure I know how my taxes work. That said, I can only speak about here in France, as I do not know how it works in other countries.
This isn't a tax, it's a requirement that 5% must be spent on Canadian content. So unless they aren't already spending at least 5% on content then it might affect the mix of content they have available but it shouldn't affect their costs.
The Liberals under Trudeau is losing badly and will lose the next election. When the Conservatives and Poilievre come to power next election, they will cancel it for sure. Then the Liberals can attack Poilievre and the Conservatives for being anti-minority, anti-aboriginal and anti-French (where the money is suppose to go).
Why do you think the buy back for the assault style weapons is being pushed back to the election? Poilievre and the Conservatives will cancel the buy back. The Liberals will attack saying the Poilievre and Conservatives are pro-gun nuts and are anti-women (banning guns is huge in Quebec due to École Polytechnique massacre).
Eventually, propping up these news conglomerates is going to feel like taxing icann to maintain flash. Short-sighted idiocy, of one variety of another if regnisgnaw's comment is correct.
It's amazing that this South Park clip just gets more and more true every year. "Canada wants more money! Other countries get lots of money, we want some of that money. How about the Internet? Internet makes lots of money!"