Hungary's government wants to tax Internet data, and thousands of citizens responded to the plan by swarming the streets of the capital on Sunday night.

Around 10,000 people turned up in Budapest to protest the proposal, which would tax Internet providers 150 Hungarian forints (around $0.60) per gigabyte of traffic they serve to users. The protesters, who mainly organized through a Facebook group that has almost 220,000 likes, are afraid that providers will push the cost of the tax down to customers, limiting Internet access and hurting freedom of speech.

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"Those who use the Internet see more of the world — that’s why the government doesn’t want a free Internet," Balazs Gulyas, the organizer of the protest, told the crowd in Budapest, according to Bloomberg. "We’re not going to pay an Internet tax to a corrupt tax authority."

The protesters marched to the Economy Ministry and held up their cellphones in an image reminiscent of Hong Kong's recent protests.

"The Internet connects people and it should not be limited," Krisztina Nagy, one of the protesters, told Reuters.

The unusualproposal has been described as the world's first tax on Internet data itself (as opposed to, say, a simple sales tax paid by consumers on a monthly Internet bill). In the United States, for example, Internet Tax Freedom Act prohibits federal, state and local authorities from creating Internet-only taxes such as bandwidth taxes, owing to the idea that information publicly available on the Internet shouldn't be taxed.

The Internet tax in Hungary was introduced by the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban last week as part of the 2015 tax bill. It was immediately met with criticism not just from Hungary's citizens, but also from European authorities. Neelie Kroes, the European Union's commissioner for the digital agenda, slammed the proposal on Twitter.

Proposed internet tax in #Hungary is a shame: a shame for users and a shame on the Hungarian government. I do not support! — Neelie Kroes (@NeelieKroesEU) October 22, 2014

The protests had an immediate effect. Orban's party, Fidesz, issued a statement late Sunday announcing that it would cap the tax at 700 forints ($2.87) a month, according to The Wall Street Journal. The economic ministry expects to collect around 20 billion forints ($82 million) a year from this tax.

An estimate of the per-hour cost of the tax for various popular Internet services was tweeted by Kroes' spokesperson Ryan Heath.

The internet tax price hike in #Hungary : Spotify: 9 cents/hour Facebook: 14c/hr Skype: 36c/hr Movie stream: $19 Streaming TV series: $323 — Ryan Heath (@RyanHeathWriter) October 26, 2014

The Internet tax proposal is a continuation of a series of measures by the Orban government to "stifle civil society and curtail freedom of expression,' according to Rian Wanstreet, a research fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University in Budapest and the Special Projects Manager at Access, a human rights organization.

"This move to tax internet use is unprecedented, and sounds like a bad joke taken too far," she told Mashable via email. "What you're seeing on the streets of Budapest is a backlash against this continual erosion of rights, and a people pushed to a breaking point."

This post has been updated to include the quote from Rian Wanstreet's