Using a Digital Entertainment Tax to Strengthen Local Information Infrastructure in The United States: A Conceptual Exploration

As traditional local media decline, how might state and local governments provide support for local information infrastructure? We offer a proposal for states (or communities) to tax digital entertainment and then leverage existing community media centers (CMCs) to facilitate the distribution of the proceeds to local media outlets. Local news and information are vitally important to the civic and democratic health of communities, but their commercial prospects in the United States continue to worsen as digital media displace traditional local media outlets in people’s daily routines. Despite some bipartisan enthusiasm, recent proposals for public funding of local news media face serious political and practical obstacles. Rather than a federal intervention, we call for states and/or cities to levy their own taxes upon digital entertainment goods (like songs purchased from iTunes) and services (like Netflix and Spotify), and then use a portion of the proceeds to support local media, particularly preexisting community media center (CMC) infrastructure.