Can An Internet Tax Save The Media?
In an effort to pull the American media business up from its downward spiral, alternative financing models beyond Web advertising continue to be floated. One of these proposals concerns the idea that a fee or tax could be placed on Internet service providers. "There has been a growing attention to this as the advertising supporting models have weakened over the last six or seven months," said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University. The ISP proposal recognizes that "there are some businesses that benefit from the digital distribution of content" such as ISPs, which "are in a good position to transfer money to content holders," he said. Under such a model, the government could collect the fees and divide the money among content creators or ISPs could collect a fee from users and distribute the money themselves.
The U.S. Internet Service Provider Association's Kate Dean gave the ISP proposal a chilly reception. "Every business model has had to adapt to new technologies and that includes ISPs. And this is a time of great change and great opportunity to interfere with this process through regressive taxation is ill advised," she said. Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Project for Excellence in Journalism, raised the ISP idea during an interview on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show on Monday. Another idea she mentioned is to follow on the cable television model "where the provider charges a kind of subscription fee and any news outlet that it is going to contain inside its walls they have to pay a little bit of money for so some of the fees they collect ends up going out to the news organizations." -- Winter Casey
Join the Discussion
The National Journal Group has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor the comments and to remove any materials it deems inappropriate.
Comments powered by Disqus