French lawmakers back a €0.055-per-gigabyte tax on internet traffic
French lawmakers approved a tax of €0.055 for every gigabyte of internet traffic
During the 2027 budget debate, the National Assembly adopted an amendment creating a tax on data flows from content providers, expected to raise around €10 billion, mostly from global tech giants. The finance committee and the government opposed it, warning the cost could be passed to advertisers and smaller French providers. The measure passed by a single vote, 11 to 10.
I fail to see how you could pass a tax on to users of Facebook, Instagram or TikTok when those services are free.
- mariopt
This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Just old people being old people.
- Rexxar
At this level, the title is fake news, there is approximately zero chance this go in the final law at this point.
But all usual troll that like to trash talk on Europe at every occasion will be there to add their comment.
- apt-get
Worth noting the vote for this law passed 11 to 10, and it's an amendment to the budget which is 100% likely to be thrown out anyway.
- wernerb
This can be seen as a "look europe, we are trying to address our huge debt peoblem (which is 120% of gdp in 2026), please continue to help us". France as well as the French themselves do not want to address the extreme cost of their early pensions to their budget (25% of the 2026 budget!). The retirees and employees often get amazing perks from the government. Employees and retirees of EDF get a 90% discount on their gas and electric bill. 21% of the total workforce works for government... Meanwhile kids can't get a decent education, I would be pissed off too.
- adrian_b
The tax is huge.
Fortunately, I do not live in France.
Otherwise, this tax would cost me at least 50% of what I pay for all my food, daily.
50 GB of daily traffic is normal for me, sometimes even much more, e.g. one day ago I had a traffic of 1 TB per day, because I downloaded the Mistral Large LLM weights. So to download Mistral, I would have had to pay EUR 55, much more than I pay for a month of Internet access.
- epsteingpt
YouTube is crushing our national TV product, so let's tax YouTube.
It seems... fine.
But legislators are slow and companies are smart, so likely what would happen is something like:
1. Tax goes in place.
2. YouTube decreases the quality and starts broadcasting in 640x480 VGA.
3. France gets pissed. Forces them to 'distribute content at world standards with a law'
4. YouTube challenges the law in court.
5. The case costs the French more than the revenue provided in the meanwhile.
Or YouTube leaves France.
Who is winning here?
- a_humean
So two ways to look at tax:
1) How it changes behaviour (taxing something usually means less of that thing is produced, and sometimes you want less of something e.g. smoking as a classic example)
2) How much revenue it raises for the treasury after taking into account 1
I cannot help but think that on both counts this is really bad.
This seems like an absurdly high rate of taxation on a resource that if anything we want to increase the volume of. Creating disincentives for high speed/bandwidth connections and services surely means less economic activity net, which means lower revenues and profits to tax across multiple industries. You are creating very direct disincentives on economic activity in a very blunt way. Its not like you are say taxing online gambling activity which is a net social drain on society, this is everything digital/tech.
I can understand that they want to maybe tax mainly foreign tech and media firms, but this seems like the worst way to go about it with a tax that would make up the bulk of the cost to serve.
- revolvingthrow
French government should buy a bunch of subscriptions like netflix or cheap games on Steam that have large download sizes and just download all day. Pay the monthly $20, then recover 10x that from taxing the CDN.
You can solve your government's finances with this one weird trick!