UK Broadband Tax? Get Out Of My Face!!

UK broadband users will be paying a "broadband tax" before the next election - which is due in the first half of 2010. At a speech before the British Computer Society, Stephen Timms - the Minister for Digital Britain - argued that the tax would raise £175 million and would be used to increase access to broadband in rural areas.

Now this really grills my cheese. Like so much well-intentioned taxation, it contains a central conceit which is basically unanswered, namely: why is the government getting involved in becoming a broadband provider in the first place?

The fact is that broadband access and take-up has being happening quite nicely thank you very much for over a decade now with no intervention from the State. Are there areas that are underserved in terms of broadband connectivity? Sure. Does it follow that we should be funding a "solution."

I submit that we most certainly should not. Firstly, predictions of future development of technology are often woeful. By the time this tax has been collected and processed, bidders invited and vetted and contracts won, the market will be almost unrecognisable from today. And that's before a single line has been laid.

For example, look at the sheer number of mobile broadband providers you can currently use in the UK. Two years ago, mobile broadband was a novelty and suffered from patchy coverage. Now, HSDPA connections are everywhere and growing in coverage and speed every month and universal coverage for the UK is hardly a million years away. You don't have to be a geek to have noticed the massive surge in take-up of mobile internet devices over recent years.

And when this tax has been collected, and the lines are laid down in about 5 years time (when they will be irrelevant) who will pay for the connection and data usage themselves? How long before we are told that the problem isn't access but poverty and a further tax imposed to create 'more equality?'

Sure, the 50p charge is itself trivial - but it is the accumulation of such trivialities that has brought us to brink of national bankruptcy. Why the government feels that it has either the moral legitimacy or technical prowess to bring about such 'solutions' when all prevailing evidence tends to the contrary is completely beyond me.

The government should be doing everything in its power to create a better business environment so that greater wealth can lead naturally to better access to services like broadband instead of chasing gimcrack, anti-competitive measures like this.