There’s a quote which says, “Nothing is certain except for death and taxes.” For the most part this is true as people around the world are being taxed by their governments for all sorts of things. Sales tax, service tax, import/export taxes, income tax, and interestingly enough in Hungary, internet tax.
The Hungarian government has recently proposed a bill which could see the implementation of internet tax come 2015. The idea is to tax data transfers which would see internet service providers pay as much as 150 forints (around $0.60) per gigabyte of data transferred, although the “good news” is that it will allow for companies to offset corporate income tax at the same time.
However as expected, Hungary’s citizens weren’t particularly thrilled by the news. Over 100,000 people have since joined a Facebook group in which they are protesting the tax in fear that the increased costs incurred by the internet service providers would then be passed down to the customer.
Given that Hungary managed to hit around 1.15 billion gigabytes of data in 2013 and with mobile internet reaching 18 million gigabytes, it has been estimated by consultancy firm eNet that the government could rake in as much as 175 billion forints a year (around $720 million).
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