Sweden used to have it like this. You had to pay a license for owning
a TV receiver. But then the public broadcaster also started offering streaming over the internet. Then they declared "also a computer is a TV receiver" and required everyone with a computer to pay TV license. If you refused, you were taken to court. The court agreed with the broadcaster. Only in the highest court was it thrown out. Had it not, there would have been an explicit tax on owning a computer in Sweden.
This was a despicable period and since then the law has changed. Now there is no license fee on owning a TV receiver. Instead everyone pays a tax whether they own a TV, a computer, whatever and no matter if they watch TV or not.
"Once upon a time, the government tried to impose a tax you had to pay if you had a TV or a computer, which was bad because even people who never watched TV would have had to pay it. But it's better now, because instead there's a tax that literally everyone pays, even if they don't watch TV and even if they don't have a computer."
I'm struggling to see what principles would make the first situation bad without also making the second one bad.
The second one is more just in the context of public TV being a public service: society pays as a whole, instead of having some unenforceable, incomplete, broken kludge to make only people that watch it pay, like for a commercial service.
Ideally the individual cost is very low, so it’s not outlandish to have everyone pay, especially as even if you don’t watch it, you benefit from the diffusion of qualitative culture and news in society.
By not making everyone pay, this public service has to compete for attention with commercial ones and risks drifting away in quality.
The counterpoint is that such a state-owned channel could become a propaganda tool.
Because it is less hypocritic and more fair. The license fee was per household, the tax is per person. Many dodged the fee while still having a TV. Cannot do that now
But both are bad, the former more so than the current, at least.
There is still a tax on computers (or rather storage) in Sweden. We pay an extra fee for private copying set on the number of megabytes you can store on harddrives, CD's, DVD's or flash drives. But at least that means it's legal for you to copy your friends DVD's and music collection, no matter what the license says in the box.
Yes, not on computers, but on storage as you say. And it is a one time tax on top of the price, not a recurring yearly tax as the license fee would have been.
This was a despicable period and since then the law has changed. Now there is no license fee on owning a TV receiver. Instead everyone pays a tax whether they own a TV, a computer, whatever and no matter if they watch TV or not.