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Please do not write below the line

(www.bbctvlicence.com)
313 points dcminter | 1 comments | 21 Oct 24 18:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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cooper_ganglia ◴[21 Oct 24 19:34 UTC] No.41907633[source]▶
A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK.

Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

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Zak ◴[21 Oct 24 19:38 UTC] No.41907684[source]▶
Many European countries are worse about it than the UK; even people who do not own a television are required by law to pay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence

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notatoad ◴[21 Oct 24 19:54 UTC] No.41907865[source]▶
that seems fine to me. whatever they want to call it, if it applies to everybody it's just a tax and they're using tax dollars to fund some TV content and/or infrastrcture. that's all totally normal.

the absurd part is restricting that tax to only people who watch TV, and trying to do surveillance and enforcement to determine whether or not somebody is eligible for a TV tax.

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1. frankus ◴[21 Oct 24 22:54 UTC] No.41909410[source]▶
The whole scheme seems like something an American would come up with: paying for public services with regressive user fees instead of broad-based progressive taxation.

But it's unheard of (for media[1]) in the US and common in Europe.

[1]The closest thing we have here might be parking passes for state parks, even unpopular ones where free parking would remain mostly empty.