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[–] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is/was a thing in many other European countries too.

In Austria it used to be (not long ago, a few years at most) that only people who owned a TV needed to pay it, not anymore, now every household has to pay it, so it is basically a household tax.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's not a tax tho? At least not in Germany. It's going directly to the state-broadcasting service but unconditionally; the idea being it's harder to influence the content or threaten them with cutting off their funding.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    This is also the case in Austria according to https://orf.beitrag.at/faq/allgemein so whether to call that a "tax" or not is purely a terminological question. It used to be that this was only required for owning a TV, but this was hard to enforce because there was no automatic legal requirement to let inspectors into one's home and companies started to produce TVs without a TV tuner (i.e. could only stream from the Internet) to get around this.

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