France did something like that last month. To support the "Centre national de la musique", a new 1.2% tax was added on digital music streaming services. But rather than absorbing the cost, Spotify just raised its subscription cost.
In the end, the government just taxes its citizens more instead of getting a bigger share of revenue from these companies.<p><a href="https://newsroom.spotify.com/2024-03-07/spotify-to-adjust-its-prices-over-new-tax-in-france" rel="nofollow">https://newsroom.spotify.com/2024-03-07/spotify-to-adjust-it...</a>
Huge oligopolistic algorithms tend to homogenize consumer behavior, so I think it's not wrong to support local and small artists. Additionally, giants can even influence the algorithms to favor their new hits [0]. I am also not sure how much tax avoidance is happening in Canada.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/2/21545958/spotify-artist-tiktok-promotion-rate-royalty-algorithm" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/2/21545958/spotify-artist-t...</a>
I'm Canadian and I don't think this makes sense at all. Netflix (etc) isn't a TV station or a radio station broadcasting cultural programming on the airwaves, it's a self-serve library of digital content you pay to access for as long as you want to have access to whatever you choose to access. What makes that so different from a bookstore or membership-based physical library?
Sorry, but Canada demanding "internet money".. you got to be kidding me.<p><a href="https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Department_of_Internet_Money" rel="nofollow">https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Department_of_Internet_Mon...</a><p>"In order to give the Canadians more money because, according to Stephen Abootman, Canada doesn't have enough money [...] They receive 10 million 'theoretical dollars', which ends up being useless for the Canadians."<p>Anyway, I'm dumb and I'm not getting it even after reading it. What does Disney+ or Netflix have to do with "local news"?
“The regulations exclude revenue from audiobooks, podcasts, video game services, and user-generated content. The exclusion of revenue from user-generated content is a win for Google's YouTube.”<p>Yeah it also makes sure Montreal’s thriving video game industry isn’t negatively impacted either. And Google have branches in Canada employing Canada maybe Netflix doesn’t have as many I wonder about that.<p>This is another reason why I hate it when countries do stuff like this because they always implement it very hypocritically too. They didn’t innovate the wildly popular product that has come into their country or “being dumped” into their country which is usually their word choice driven by envy and their local competition can’t compete so they pull nonsense like this to get at some of that revenue.<p>India and China have done variations of this for years but now Europe and it looks like Canada are doing it or planning to and I’m sure soon other countries.<p>Even here in America this has started with Biden’s recent moves on China and Trump wants to double those if elected. So both parties are moving into this mindset.<p>Most American multinational companies generally thrive in a global marketplace, same with Japanese, Chinese, South Korean, and German companies. I know Spotify was Scandinavian but they moved to the US some time back right?<p>I guess rest of the world got fed up with this small set of countries dominating the Consumer Tech and Entertainment marketplace and wants to grab at some of their revenue when it’s coming from people living within their borders using the international product.<p>Companies will probably just pass these costs on to the consumers and try to minimize absorption.