A Boneheaded Move

Via Cronaca comes word that the German government is about to do something very, very stupid:

Computer owners in Germany will need a TV licence in future after German TV and Radio Licensing Authorities proved PCs could be used to watch the telly.

The fee will be collected whether the computer has been equipped to receive radio and television with a "TV card" or not, and will apply to all PCs with an internet connection from January 1, 2007.

What a disgusting piece of legislation. Not only is it an act of regressive taxation whose burden will be felt most keenly by the poorest Germans, but it is being done in order to finance programming whose raison d'etre has never been in greater doubt than in an era in which cable and satellite TV have become ubiquitous.

The cheekiest thing of all is that the very excuse that is being used to advance this nasty piece of legislation is one that actually serves to undermine the rationale for publicly-funded TV: in an age in which internet-based broadcasting is doing away with the old limitations on choice that were used to sell the notion of public TV, the common good would be far better served by abolishing public corporations like the BBC and ZDF, and making the prime spectrum they occupy freely available for open spectrum technologies like spread-spectrum and ultra-wideband. Old-style broadcasting based on slicing up spectrum as if it were necessarily a scarce resource is horribly inefficient, and must die for the same reason packet-switching is ringing the death knell of old-fashioned telephone services.

Instead of embracing the future, the German government is trying to stifle it for the sake of the past, under the dubious rationale that a bunch of government clock-punchers can know what constitutes "quality programming" better than the ignorant proles who are forced to pay their wages: an assumption the wisdom of which is hardly borne out by recurrent reports on telepathic parrots and three-headed frogs.

PS: This article by David Weinberger lays out the technical aspects of open-spectrum in a manner easily appreciated by laymen.

Comments

[Mrs Tilton]

Ah yes, well here we come right up against an age-old problem, don't we? Arrogant bureaucrats think they know better than ignorant proles what makes for 'quality' programming. Annoys me too. Thing is, have you ever spent much time watching Pro7 or RTL or SAT1? They're... rather shite, you know.

Not that ARD is much better. But it does have Tatort. And Christiansen. And the news is better. And, most importantly, it has the Bundesliga, wrested back from that wretch Leo Kirch. (Though not a libertarian like you, I am pretty liberal; but when it comes to football I'm afraid I'm a bit of a bolshevik. Some things are too important to expose to market forces.)

I'd have had a good deal more sympathy for your complaint back in the days when the öffentlich-rechtliche were, literally, the only game in town. But, now that competition is open, I'm not terribly disturbed that a measure of public broadcasting remains. I do wish they'd find a better way to finance it than licence fees, though. (Maybe this is an insoluble conundrum. American public television is not supported by a licence fee, but then they do have those interminable pledge drives.)

Levying a licence fee on computers is pretty infuriating nonetheless. And I suspect to will be more easily enforceable than the licence fee for televisions and radios. Vast numbers of Germans simply don't pay their GEZ; whilst I am anything but a techie, I imagine it'd be easier for the state to 'trace' internet-connected computer users than gogglebox-watchers.

[Abiola Lapite]

"Thing is, have you ever spent much time watching Pro7 or RTL or SAT1? They're... rather shite, you know."

Then again, HBO has earned an enviable reputation for quality programming, showing that public funding isn't a necessary condition for decent television viewing to be had.

"But, now that competition is open, I'm not terribly disturbed that a measure of public broadcasting remains."

The thing is, the opportunity cost of keeping that public broadcasting around is greater than just the deadweight loss from forcing the entire populace to pay for TV programming they'll never watch, as these public broadcasters are all sitting on valuable spectrum that could be used far more efficiently. HDTV-quality video can be streamed at as low a rate as 6 Mbps, well within the range of the ADSL services that have been available for ages now, while publicly-supported broadcasters all around the world are sitting on spectrum that could easily provide as much as 100 times that much bandwidth to each network user. It is utterly mad from an economic viewpoint to keep the likes of the BBC and ZDF around under such circumstances. At the very least, they ought to be shorn of their spectrum and begin to operate like internet radio stations do today. That would not only free up valuable spectrum for more efficient usage, but would also lower their cost structures radically, making such revenue-grabbing gestures as that in the article I linked to unnecessary.

Of course, this isn't going to happen, as too many politically connected individuals have too much personally at stake to tolerate the dissolution of these empires, which leads me to yet another reason why public broadcasting is generally such a bad idea: not only is it vulnerable to political manipulation in a way that a profit-oriented broadcaster wouldn't be (witness the BBC Hutton Report flap), but like all government programs, it only tends to grow, never shrink, whatever the original rationale for its creation might have been.

[Peter Nolan]

Maybe this is an exception to the fact that the Germans are always very polite and helpful until you try and buy something from them.