Asks finance industry to research tax on online advertising for Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MSN, and other Internet portals as a way to help finance ways for writers, musicians, publishers, and other artists to also make money from the web.
France seems to be convinced the Internet is destroying French culture, that it’s robbing artists of all shapes and sizes of their fair share of revenue and essentially starving them to death.
First it was the controversial “three-strikes” law that gave authorities the power to disconnect illegal file-sharers from the Internet, a deal that was made in exchange for entertainment industry pledges to drop DRM protections and speed up theater to DVD release times.
Now the French govt is considering a “Google tax,” a tax on the online advertising revenue of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and other Internet portals, as a way to further improve the availability of French cultural works on the Internet, to help finance ways for writers, musicians, publishers, and other artists to also make money from the web.
Patrick Zelnik, CEO of the independent record label Naïve, Jacques Toubon, a former French Minister, and Guillaume Cerutti, president of Sotheby’s France, formed the three-member commission that devised the proposal which French President Nicolas Sarkozy is now considering.
Cerutti accuses Google and the others of “enrichment without consideration of the consequences.”
The tax would raise an estimated $14 to $28 million annually for a tax rate of about 1 to 2%, but it raises several legal questions, not the least of which is the fact that Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MSN, and the other large Internet portals it has in its sights aren’t even located in France.
The commission suggested that Google could base the tax on ad-clicks by users with French IP addresses.
One of the other specific recommendations made to strengthen and support French culture is using proceeds from the tax to issue MP3 gift card to young people with €25 ($36) in credit as a way of encouraging legal downloading of French music.
Google is rightly upset with the proposal. Olivier Esper, CEO of Google France, fears a tax on online advertising will harm the delicate “ecosystem” of the Internet.
He said the govt should “encourage cooperation,” and not “extend a logical opposition between the worlds of the Internet and culture, for example through the logic of taxation.”
In other words, the Internet and culture are not mutually exclusive. The Internet should be seen as a way to spread cultural works with unparalleled ease and convenience, making them available to all like never before.
Yves Le Mouël, president of the French Federation of Telecom, also noted that “In one form or another, (it’s) the end customer who pays,” and he’s right. Google and the others will simply raise advertising rates in France to cover the increased costs associated with doing business there, and it’s foolish to think otherwise.
The news comes after last month’s defeat by Google which dared to digitize French books held in US libraries and make them available to all. The French sued and “won,” only to pledge soon thereafter that it would spend $1.1 billion USD of its own to do the same job itself.
“We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is,” said Pres Sarkozy afterwards.
When a company is trying to increase access to that heritage, and it’s artists who seem to be standing in the way, who’s really doing the “stripping?”
Stay tuned.
That proves once more that according to these ppl everybody is a Pirate. We’re stealing music from bittorrent, Google is stealing content from everywhere and poor artists, the internets hates them….not.
Things have to change. We have to stay close on this and fight back.
The French president proves once again how clueless he is.
I have a new proposal. Let’s have a Sarkozy tax. Every time the prime minister or the French governing party makes a stupid move like this, they are fined $3 million (after the three strikes law). The money would go straight to an organization that will do whatever it takes to overthrow the governing party who’s responsible for such blind idiocy.