The French National Assembly voted on Friday to charge senders of digital content 5.5 euro cents for every gigabyte they deliver to internet users in France. The measure — a Socialist amendment to the 2027 budget bill — passed by 11 votes to 10. Of the 577 deputies, 35 were in the chamber and 21 voted.
It is not a law. The vote was a first reading, the government argued against the amendment, and the Senate, where the centre-right Republicans hold a majority, is unlikely to keep it. Yaël Braun-Pivet, the assembly's president, has already urged Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to push the budget through without a vote under Article 49.3 — a route that would let the government drop the gigabyte rule from the text entirely.
What makes the proposal unusual is the machinery. France's telecom regulator Arcep estimates that around 200 billion gigabytes reach French connections each year, and the amendment's authors say about half of that comes from five companies: Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and the CDN operator Akamai. To collect, internet providers — Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free — would have to record how much data each sender delivers and identify the sender, then report anonymised quarterly aggregates to the tax authority under Arcep's supervision. Traffic served from a CDN is counted at the total volume leaving that network. According to the text, only quantities are measured; content is never inspected.
The authors expect up to €10 billion a year. The arithmetic shows what that means in practice. According to Steam's download statistics, users in France pulled 62.7 petabytes in the past seven days — roughly €3.4 million a week, or about €180 million a year for Steam traffic alone. A 200-gigabyte game would carry €11 of tax per download. An average fixed-line connection, which Arcep puts at 267 gigabytes a month, would theoretically generate almost €15 a month. For scale: the wholesale price of transmitting a gigabyte is usually below one cent, according to industry estimates, so the levy would be a multiple of the cost of the pipe itself.
The sharpest reaction came from a French open-source project. VideoLAN, the non-profit behind the VLC media player, warned the tax would cost it more than €1 million a year. "So, the French socialists, and Parliament members just voted a tax, that they don't understand, which would cost VideoLAN more than 1 million euro per year," it wrote on X. "They are probably the most clueless politician on Earth? And they claim they want technological sovereignty."
The maths is simple enough: at 5.5 cents a gigabyte, €1 million is about 18 million gigabytes, or roughly 18 petabytes a year — plausible for software with billions of downloads. What the amendment does not say is how the cap of 15 percent of French revenue, or 2 percent of global revenue, would apply to a non-profit with barely any revenue at all. Critics of VideoLAN's complaint make that same point from the other direction.
Its authors argue the tax base is the only one that cannot be moved. The traditional economy — shops, factories, employees in France — pays tax because its base sits physically in the country, they say. Global tech firms sell to the same customers over the same infrastructure but book a self-declared profit wherever suits them; data delivered to French households cannot be relocated abroad. They add an environmental argument: if every gigabyte costs money, providers have an incentive to compress harder and ship less, and they say the measurement technology already exists.
The pushback came from inside the government too. Budget minister David Amiel questioned whether data flows can be measured at all without installing dedicated sensors on operators' networks or measuring on users' devices, and argued that half the tax would fall on smaller providers, many of them French. Philippe Juvin, general rapporteur of the finance committee, warned of a different effect: the big platforms would pass the burden on to advertisers. The finance committee had rejected the amendment in early October.
Passing costs on is the familiar pattern — Amazon, for one, is passing a new parcel tax to customers in full. Critics expect pricier subscriptions or lower streaming quality as providers try to cut volumes. The French approach also differs from Europe's "fair share" fight, in which telecoms operators want Big Tech to fund their networks: here the money would go straight into the state budget.
