French lawmakers pass a €0.055-per-gigabyte tax on internet traffic by a single vote
French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax
France's National Assembly adopted amendment I-1358 by 11 votes to 10, imposing a €0.055 per gigabyte levy on content providers — from Netflix and Steam to GitHub, Google Drive, and CDNs like Cloudflare. Telecom operators would measure each provider's quarterly volumes under Arcep and tax-authority oversight, with the bill capped at 15% of French revenue or 2% of global revenue. The government opposed it; the Senate still must weigh in.
The vote came down to a single ballot in the chamber: 11 votes against 10.
- nick486
apologies for the article in French, but I found no English sources reporting this yet. It is totally ridiculous...
- Youden
So for a download of the newest Call of Duty, you'd need to pay 6.33 EUR? Not for the purchase but the download? What is up with France?
- miohtama
It’s about to kill VideoLan foundation (VLC):
https://x.com/videolan/status/2116229135919919278?a=5Ua5pSOr...
- netsharc
From the translation; to be paid by the content providers, with a cap of 15% of their income in France or 2% of their global income.
Dear Netflix, my startup is Uber but for carrier pigeons. Carrying SD cards! With AI-optimized routing because I gotta mention AI somewhere...
- dabinat
I currently pay $0.005/GB for bandwidth, which works out to a similar amount in Euros. So this tax would constitute a tenfold cost increase to deliver data to France.
- monneyboi
This is taxing communication and should not be legal. I don't see how it's different from having to pay for talking to your neighbor.
- dzonga
piracy wins again.
even if content providers are paying - it still inhibits consumption as content providers simply pass the cost to the consumer.
imagine netflix vs megaupload. megaupload or any of those or torrents - they could be registered entities or none but they r not gonna pay. consumers will simply get their content from those sites vs the official ones.
show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome as charlie munger said.
- dumberquestions
If you're paying €35/month for home internet, consuming 500 GB per month, all of which was from taxable sources, and the tax was indirectly passed on to you, you'd be paying €60/month for internet.
But at the same time the tax is capped at 15% of the providing company's French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue, and realistically speaking, not all companies would pass the tax on to the users, so it could end up being a noticeable but not catastrophic additional expense for both users and companies, if the bill passes at all, that is.