Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, said that he scrapped the plans for a controversial Internet tax law, explaining that it just can’t be introduced in its current form. Tens of thousands of protesters went out to the streets of Budapest to express their discontent with the law. Most of them regard the tax as just another try to crack down on opposition voices and curtail civil liberties.

However, the plans for a kind of Internet tax were not off the table entirely, with the Prime Minister just rescheduling a national consultation for 2015. The protesters fear that the government had not registered their true concerns. They explained that for many people in Hungary the Internet has become a remedy from the government, but now the latter is trying to pull down a digital iron curtain like they have in Iran or China.

In the meantime, Viktor Orbán has been repeatedly accused of turning his back on democratic principles. It is known, for example, that since coming to power four yeas ago, he managed to overhaul the country’s constitution, push through a legislation to muzzle the press and even changed the electoral system to boost the mandate of the ruling party. The Prime Minister was re-elected in April 2014, although his party gained 21% few domestic votes than last time. Nevertheless, the protests against the Internet tax law have now reinvigorated the critics.

The draft law suggested to tax users about $0.60 per GB of data usage, with a monthly cap of $2.7 for private users and $20 for legal entities. The government figured out that about $250m could be raised via the tax and later spent on extending the national broadband infrastructure.

The protesters point out that the tax scheme could be easily circumvented by changing users’ IP addresses or using foreign ISPs. American and French politicians have also floated proposals for an Internet usage tax, but both found out that their plans were impossible to realize unless carried out by several big industrial nations at once.

As usual, the Internet subscribers fear that the ISPs would pass administration costs down to them, discouraging Internet usage in general. It is known that Hungary is already under scrutiny for attacks on press freedom, and the law would mean that one of the biggest sources of alternative news would become harder to access. As a result, over 70,000 protesters showed up in the streets in Budapest.