I’m from the states and just heard of the concept for the first time. Curious where this came from and how it’s enforced.
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In the early days of radio you had to get a licence to own one, because radio technology was new and experimental and there were various concerns about the impacts it would have – and it was only really used for stuff like military communications and shipping, so there was no real reason for ordinary people to own them anyway.
Companies that sold radios came up with the idea of starting public broadcasts so that they could market them to the general public. In the UK, the government and the radio companies agreed to set up a monopolistic broadcaster called the British Broadcasting Company, later the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was funded by a share of sales of radio sets. This turned out to be insufficient, in part because people were building their own radios or buying them unofficially. So the licensing system was adapted into a way of funding radio broadcasts.
After the Second World War, the BBC also started broadcasting TV programmes, and it was decided to set up a similar TV licensing system to fund this instead of funding it out of general taxation, since it was thought that it wasn’t fair to raise everyone’s taxes to fund something that only a minority of wealthy people would benefit from. Over time, TV became ubiquitous and this rationale didn’t make sense any more. Nowadays, people tend to argue that the system is justified because it helps keep the BBC independent of the government – the government can’t just cut the BBC’s budget when they’re unhappy with it. This reasoning doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, because the government *can* cut the licence fee if they want, and they also get to appoint the people who run the BBC (e.g. the current BBC director-general is a former Conservative activist who has cracked down on BBC personalities criticising the government on social media and has also banned them from attending Pride parades).
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