The publishers of right-wing Austrian news site Unzensuriert (Uncensored) have filed a complaint with the country’s media regulator.
They claim that a subsidy of €90 million that Austria started paying to its public broadcaster ORF in 2024 constitutes illegal state aid that distorts competition.
The 24-page complaint – which Brussels Signal has obtained – was filed with regulator Kommunikationsbehörde Austria (KommAustria) on February 10.
The publishers take issue with the so-called “compensation for input tax damage”, which the Austrian state started paying to ORF in 2024. That amounted to €89 million in 2024 and €92 million in 2025, according to the complaint.
The publishers have asked the Austrian Communications Authority (KommAustria) to confirm this subsidy constitutes illegal state aid and to demand its repayment from ORF to the government.
Walter Asperl, managing director of Unzensuriert, told Brussels Signal today: “Legally, KommAustria would have to act immediately. However, based on our experience, they will probably still try to sit out the issue.
“If they take more than six months to act we will take the appropriate legal action for delay,” Asperl warned.
The reasons for the subsidy stem from a politically motivated overhaul of Austria’s TV tax system.
Until 2023, every household that owned a TV was required to pay an annual fee of (on average) €320 to ORF since they could theoretically use the device to watch ORF programmes – even if they only used it to watch Netflix in practice.
This fee included 10 per cent value-added tax (VAT).
In 2023, the government of then-chancellor Karl Nehammer (Austrian People’s Party, ÖVP) replaced this decade-old system with a new household TV levy.
Since 2024, every Austrian household has to pay €183.60 annually to ORF, irrespective of TV ownership or whether they consume any of the services offered by the public broadcasting behemoth.
Crucially, this levy was not made subject to VAT – for political reasons, as Unzensuriert surmises.
This meant ORF did not have to pay the VAT to the state, thus reducing its intake. It also meant the broadcaster could no longer reclaim all the VAT it paid as input tax – meaning it had to pay a higher price for equipment, freelancer services and many other inputs.
To compensate ORF for this “damage”, the government decided to pay out the annual subsidy of circa €90 million. That equates to 26 per cent of ORF’s 2024 turnover and is more than the total annual budget of most Austrian private media companies.
Unzensuriert claims this compensation constitutes an illegal state subsidy for ORF – as it distorted competition and was not notified to the European Commission in accordance with European law.
Ideally, Asperl told Brussels Signal, the regulators would find that not just the input tax subsidy but the entire household levy – from which ORF takes in more than €730 million annually – constitutes illegal state aid.
The public broadcaster dominates Austria’s media landscape in TV, radio and online news thanks to its high income from the TV tax, which no private media company can compete with.
The TV levy is criticised by many on the Austrian right as unfair as it requires all Austrians to pay for TV giant often accused of severe left-wing bias.
