How to help prop up the ailing music industry? Tax Google, suggests a new report commissioned by the French government.
The report, handed to Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand on Wednesday, says Google, Yahoo! and other Internet portals should be slapped with a new tax on their online ad revenues in France to fund the development of legal outlets for buying books, movies and especially music on the Internet.
The proposal is the latest idea to emerge amid France’s efforts to fight illegal file-sharing and impose order — French-style — on the free-for-all that is the Internet.
The plan “seemed inevitable to us, if we want to maintain a certain pluralism in the culture world” and prevent the “endless enrichment of two or three world players who will impose their cultural formatting on us,” Patrick Zelnik, a record producer who helped lead the mission, was quoted as telling Liberation newspaper.
Google appears cool to the idea, but sought a conciliatory tone. Google France’s public affairs director said the company told the mission it wanted “cooperation between Internet players and the cultural fields to develop new models.”
Olivier Esper said there were opportunities to promote innovative solutions “instead of continuing on a path that opposes the Internet and the cultural worlds, for example the path of taxation.”
The French branch of Yahoo! did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
Critics say the plan would be messy to implement and that Internet portals would shoulder an unfair share of the burden.
“Where does it start and stop? The argument is that Google has culpability for declining music revenues because people start searches for illegal files often by Google,” said Mark Mulligan, vice president of Forrester Research. But “what about the computers? Because without the computers people wouldn’t be able to download. And then what about the electricity that powers the computer?”
Mulligan…