We already have the private copying levy in Germany and some other countries, where you have to pay a fee for several products (printers, scanners, storage media like HDDs, SSDs, SD cards and thumb drives…) due to the potential that you could do (legal!) private copies of copyrighted media on them. The copyright collectives can set the amount of the fees freely (and it’s ridiculously high).

This comes shockingly close to the concept already.

I’m not sure about other countries, but here in Czech we actually have a mandatory subscription, that’s absolutely bullshit.

So far, the law is that if you own any TV or radio, you have to pay monthly fee for public service broadcasters (national Czech TV). It’s bullshit, the channels are full of ads anyway, and the shows they run and create is insultingly bad. Sure, it is important to have public service broadcasters that are not dependent on the state (because state-owned TV is reeaallly bad idea), but FFS can they just reduce costs and stick to news, instead of doing another stupid series, and stop forcing us to pay for something I don’t care about or use?

You could just not pay the fee, if you state you don’t have a TV capable of receiving it (which I don’t). But now, they are changing the law that everyone who has any kind of internet-capable device has to pay the monthly fee, while also rising prices to something like 6 EUR per month. Fuck that and fuck them.