EU and European countries are rent-seeking apparatuses whose only purpose is ensuring the status quo. Italy attempted to tax free cloud storage offered by providers such as Google, etc. to customers along with their own paid storage -- private storage is also, of course, taxed on purchase, for all hardware: from 5 to 30€ depending on capacity and intended use, because the citizen is automatically presumed to store copyrighted material on them.
Wait until you hear about Germany, where you have to pay a fee on all data storage media because it's possible that you might use it to copy something. It's awesome.
Edit: I apologize to the French people. I did not intend to disrespect your innovations or appropriate your legislature.
Same in Poland. You pay tax on printers, printer paper, disc burners, writable discs and so on, and in return you may legally make backup copies of the copyrighted works and share them with your close relatives. IANAL, though.
The best part is that this year they've added smartphones, tablets and laptops to the list of taxed devices, which is ridiculous and pure greed. And the minister argued that the manufacturers will bear the increased cost themselves, which just adds insult to injury. She also said that other countries do that already (Germany was the example AFAIR, hehe), but she just conveniently left out the fact that Poland already has one of the highest VAT rates in the EU, so our devices will be even more expensive relative to their base price, than they already are.
The state, over time, becomes parasitic. This has always been the case.
Combined with universal suffrage and the welfare state to buy votes it is a recipe for decline and ruin.
The french state is bankrupt like all the other western democracies. They hide their pension obligations well, but that doesn’t change reality.
This system will continue to suck everything it can out of the young and the productive, because those are the incentives. There is no point at which it will stop, short of regime change.
