France: Taxing the Internet to support the arts

A tax on Google is an inspired idea, said France’s Le Monde in an editorial. For years, the American Internet search giant has made a lot of money by “exploiting content it did not create.” People searching for creative products—music, movies, books—use Google, which then gets money by selling ads on its Web pages. Meanwhile, the musicians and writers who created the works are getting poorer. While the Internet has made Google rich, it has hurt creative people, whose sales have slumped because users can download their works illegally for free. Finally, the government is going to remedy the unfair situation. President Nicolas Sarkozy announced he’s considering levying a tax on Internet ad revenue. Every time a French user clicked on an ad banner or a sponsored link, the company that owned the Web page would have to pay a small tax to the French government. It’s called the “Google tax,” although it wouldn’t hit only Google: Facebook, Yahoo, and other major Web companies would also be affected. The funds would go toward programs subsidizing musicians and artists. We know such a tax would seem to “overturn the philosophy of the Internet,” where all content is supposed to be free. But “for artists and authors, it would be justice.”

You can see why Google makes such a tempting target, said Hans-Hagen Bremer in Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel. It dominates the Internet ad market in France, accounting for fully 40 percent of French Web ad revenue. And the company is flush: Last year alone, it made a profit of some $4 billion, and France gets none of that loot. Since Google’s European headquarters is in Ireland, not France, the French can’t tax the company directly. Still, it’s hard to argue that Google is cheating. How, exactly, does “putting an ad on an Internet search page” contribute to illegal downloads of cultural content?

It doesn’t, said Germany’s Financial Times Deutschland. Sarkozy’s proposal is “highly absurd.” How could such a tax be collected? Even the commission he named to study the idea isn’t sure it’s feasible. It proposes having the big Internet companies themselves figure out how much they owe France, “no matter how expensive and cumbersome” that process would be. It’s hardly likely they would consent to do so. “It would be far easier for them to simply block their French sites—hurting only French users.”

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If the idea seems irrational, maybe that’s because it was prompted by love, said Henry Samuel in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Sarkozy’s wife, the singer Carla Bruni, is said to be the one who convinced him of the “problems caused to musicians by illegal downloads.” Surely it’s no coincidence that Sarkozy appointed Bruni’s record producer, Patrick Zelnik, as chair of the commission that came up with the proposal to tax Google and fund the arts. But the proposal works better as a gesture of affection than as public policy. Internet experts agree it would be “impossible to put in place.”