Belize is about to license the fishermen while the trawler sails away untaxed

By Horace Palacio: Let me begin with a declaration of interest, because honesty is the price of your trust.

The proposed new Broadcasting Act, revealed this week, would expand the definition of broadcasting to cover the internet. Online outlets and creators earning advertising or sponsorship money from Belizean audiences would need a licence, or an official exemption, from the Belize Broadcasting Authority. That net catches podcasters, news pages, entertainment channels, and yes, the very publication carrying this column. I am inside the net I am about to discuss. Judge my argument on its merits.

And let me be fair before I am fierce, because the drafters are not villains. The online space has real problems. Defamation flows freely. Misinformation spreads faster than truth. There are no standards where standards sometimes matter. The attorney explaining the bill was careful to say the casual user going live for friends is not the target, only the regular commercial broadcaster. Fine. The instinct to bring order is not evil.

But the aim is backwards. And I can prove it with one question.

Who is the biggest broadcaster in Belize?

It is not any radio station. It is not any television house. It is not this publication or any local page. The biggest broadcasters in Belize, by audience, by hours consumed, by advertising dollars collected, are Meta, Google, and TikTok. Foreign platforms that reach more Belizean eyes every single day than every licensed Belizean broadcaster combined.

Now follow the money, because the money tells the whole story. Every time a Belizean business boosts a post, every sponsored ad served to a Belizean screen, that money leaves this country. It flies to California and Singapore. The platforms harvest Belizean attention, sell that attention back to Belizean businesses, and pay Belize nothing. No licence. No GST collected on the sale. No fee. Not one dollar to the treasury of the country whose citizens generate the value.

And into this reality walks a bill pointed at whom? At the Belizean podcaster. The Belizean news page. The young creator who figured out how to earn a living from a phone and a ring light.

Picture it plainly. A foreign supermarket sets up in the middle of every town at once, pays no rent, collects no GST, holds no licence, and sells to every Belizean household daily. And our response is to demand permits from the vendors selling tamales on the sidewalk outside. We are licensing the fishermen while the factory trawler empties our waters untaxed.

The world has already run this experiment, both ways, and the results are in.

France chose to aim upward. In 2019 it imposed a three percent tax on the revenue the digital giants earn from French users. Washington threatened tariffs. Paris held its ground. Today France collects hundreds of millions every year from the platforms, and here is the part that matters most, French creators were left completely alone. Britain did its own version at two percent. The principle is simple and just. You earned it from our people, you owe our treasury.

Uganda chose to aim downward. In 2018 it taxed its own citizens for the act of using social media, a daily fee just to open the apps. The result was a national self-inflicted wound. Millions of Ugandans simply went offline or escaped through VPNs. Small businesses that lived on those platforms bled. The revenue never came close to projections. By 2021 the government quietly abandoned the scheme. Burden your own users and creators, and you shrink your own economy while the foreign giants feel nothing at all.

Two roads, fully tested. One taxes the harvest of the giants. The other taxes the hustle of the citizens. And Belize’s draft, as revealed, starts down the Ugandan road.

There is a second danger in this bill, and it is heavier than any fee. A licence that can be granted can be denied. A licence that can be denied can be dangled. This column has already documented how advertising gets pulled in this country to punish inconvenient coverage. Now imagine every online news outlet, every commentator, every critic, holding a licence that some authority, under some administration, red or blue, must periodically renew, using criteria that live partly in official discretion. You do not need to revoke a single licence to change a country’s journalism. The mere possibility does the work. Every hard story gets weighed against the renewal date. That is not regulation. That is a leash. And a democracy should be very slow to braid one, even with good intentions.

So here is the constructive path, because this column does not tear down without building.

First, make the giants collect GST. Dozens of countries, including our Caribbean neighbours, already require foreign platforms to register and charge sales tax on digital services sold to their citizens, the subscriptions, the advertising. This is not radical. It is standard global practice, administratively proven, and it can be done here without touching a single Belizean creator. Start there, this year.

Second, study a modest digital services tax on the ad revenue the platforms extract from Belize, with eyes open. Honesty requires the caveat, such taxes have drawn American trade pressure, and Belize is small. Which is exactly why we should move with CARICOM, a coordinated regional levy that no one can bully one small island out of. Alone we whisper. Together the region speaks.

Third, flip the pipeline. Whatever Belize collects from the giants should seed a Belizean creators and local journalism fund, training, equipment, grants. Let the money extracted from Belizean attention finally return to build Belizean voices.

Fourth, fix the bill itself. Keep real standards for real harms, defamation, election integrity, child protection, but achieve them through simple registration and laws of general application, not discretionary licensing. Write every criterion into the statute, leave nothing to mood, make exemption the default and licensing the rare exception, and build a press-freedom firewall no future government can quietly remove.

Because understand what our online creators actually are. They are the seedlings of Belize’s digital economy, young people who built audiences and incomes from nothing, exporting Belizean culture and stories to the world. In every other column I write, we beg for exactly this, Belizeans producing, earning, building. Now that they exist, our first regulatory instinct is paperwork for them and a free pass for the billion-dollar platforms above them.

Tax the harvesters. Free the growers. That is the whole principle, and the world has already shown us it works.

The national conversation on this bill is just beginning, and it deserves vigour. Let this column open it with one sentence every lawmaker should tape above the draft.

Before Belize puts a single form in front of a Belizean with a microphone, send the bill to the giants who have been broadcasting to us, and billing us, for fifteen years, free of charge.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.

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