So Here in Australia the budget just got released and well, See for yourself.
Ugh
They are also introducing Goods and Services Tax (GST) on digital goods eg. steam games, netflix, ebooks and alike (you can thank Gerry Harvey for that). Its not like the Australian price of things is overpriced already or anything >.>
All the while trying to still make us swallow the fiber to the node NBN pill.
Cool, so the australian Stassi is now called 'national defence', even though it involves protecting the regime from its subjects...
You mean the NBN bill, my god that is a big bill, a bigger bill than rolling FTH out.. :(
Oh God
Joe Hockey's (Aussie treasurer) 'Netflix Tax' is expected to raise $480,769 per-day over 2-years from the activities of Aussie gamers / software downloaders / digital-content consumers.
American companies have been approached / canvased by Joe Hockey to implement a 10% GST on purchases initiated from Australia.
As in a previous Netfix case, the American companies can detect when an Aussie user is using a VPN, so this is an avenue that is null & void for Aussie digital-content consumers.
How do they detect that the person using the VPN is from australia? The way businesses do it seriously is too do it by VISA country range codes. If the politicians were smart (which they aren't) they would work with visa and master card and paypal to add the surcharge onto every transaction coming from Australia and going to a foreign account.
And it's actually the easiest way too do it, from a compliance cost standpoint, rather than requiring foreign retailers and whatnot working out all these taxes...
Foreign retailers (especially American) will be adding the Aussie GST component to their products as Joe Hockey has requested them in previous negotiations prior to the budget announcement last night.
VPN business boon for australia.
What a waste of money.
EDIT.
And a sign that australia is safe $33B for real people to protect. $427B for monitoring Australians and $22B on advertising.
Its a loopy world.
$131m is not enough.
I believe that IINet discovered that it would cost just a hair over $130/year/service/person
That would cover just 1 million internet users without their phones :)
"Tell him he's dreamin'"
Australia is fucked, it's time for all of us to start planning a move somewhere :)