TV licence collection privatised and replaced with device licence fee in 5 years

holodomor wrote: »

No one has rights to force people to pay for something they do not want.

I would revise that statement because in the welfare state that most western countries run there will always be something you are forced to pay for that you don't want. The modern welfare/warfare state model has serious flaws that will eventually lead to its collapse but this is a multimedia company we are talking about and the demise of the welfare state is a topic for somewhere else.


RTE is a multimedia content provider, it is a non-essential service that can can be funded and delivered without state assistance. It has an unfair advantage in terms of funding and both local private and community content provider enterprise must compete for scare resources (eyeballs, time, creativity and money).


The concept of “public service broadcasting” might have been justifiable at one time: it is no longer. The vested interests that want to protect the current funding model of public service broadcasting have subtly changed the meaning of the term as earlier meanings have become irrelevant. This is clearly a process of ex-post facto rationalisation designed to protect those vested interests.

The television licence fee evolved in the UK out of a system whereby the post office working with radio manufacturers charged owners of radio sets to receive programmes. It was designed to create a hypothecated charge to overcome the “public good” aspects of broadcasting. Public goods are not excludable (so it is difficult to stop people who do not pay from benefiting from them) and non-rivalrous (that is the marginal cost of serving an additional user is close to zero). Given the available technology until the 1980s, a plausible case could be made that broadcasting had these qualities.

holodomor wrote: »

Dear Pa El Grande Here is a problem that people allready are paying for things they do not want to pay but at list they use the water. But in TV licence case people are made to pay for something they do not use. You would not pay milkman because he drives next to your house but you do not buy milk.

That does not defeat their arguments, they are claiming that because you have a device that can receive free to air signals, that RTE, because the broadcasts are free to air due to the technology used, therefore qualifies as a public good and you should pay otherwise your neighbour must bear additional cost of both enforcement and the content providers own cost. (i.e. socialise the costs of RTEs losses)

Public good definition

In every economy, some goods are provided by the government to the entire people. Such goods are called public good. Specifically, public good is the one that is provided to the society as a whole and consumption by one individual doesn't reduces its availability or doesn't exclude others from consuming it.

People are getting rid of their televisions and switching to the internet and don't have to pay that tax. Content from the RTE.IE internet domain is by definition NOT a public good since the consumer has to initiate the TCP/IP connection and can't simply stick an ariel on the roof like the previous broadcast technology used plus the technology exists to restrict access to subscribers only which RTE has the technical capability to implement.

holodomor wrote: »

" because the broadcasts are free to air due to the technology used, therefore qualifies as a public good" - it does not make sense.

If you take your original argument to court you will lose. Since RTE broadcasts on specific frequencies the only potential way to win with such technology is to damage your device beyond repair so that it cannot receive transmissions on specific frequencies used by RTE. This defence has been used successfully a few decades ago in the UK, but, in this country you will have to be prepared to take this argument all the way to the supreme count.

I agree many of the terms used in economics do not make sense and often fail real world conditions, but public good is the definition the court will use if you wish to seriously challenge the current law.

holodomor wrote: »

We all have to respect the law but the law has to be made for people by people if we are a democracy. Mistakes in the law cost people to much. Hitler was democratically elected and people were respecting his law but later on many of them ended up in Nuremberg trials because they killed people just becaus they were Jews. But at the time it was a law..
Jesus was crucified by the law as well.

Dee Forbes, the NUJ or SIPTU are not quite in that league. Yet! If the law is unjust you have to contest it in court. You can't just walk into the RTE canteen and spray and pray like they do in the USA or Norway.

In 2018 they provided the Oireachtas committee with a 15% evasion rate where they estimated the were not tapping into ~€37 million that would be about ~230,000 households.

Collection Costs and Evasion

• Currently evasion stands at 15% which results in a gross loss of c. 037 million annually.
• 'NO TV Homes' (due to outdated TV exemptions) gross loss Of 0.024m annually
• As a percentage of revenue received, An Post collection costs are at 5.5% which translates as a €12 million charge on revenue and is high by European standards
• Evasion levels in Ireland is over twice that in the UK and collection costs are more than double other European counterparts.

Over €60 million every year is now being lost to public service media due to inefficiencies in the licence fee collection system.

source