Eleven votes. That’s how many it took, on Friday, for French MPs to decide that every gigabyte Netflix, YouTube, Steam or GitHub sends to a French screen should cost its sender 5.5 cents. Ten voted against. Out of 577 deputies, 21 actually pushed a button. The France gigabyte tax is now officially part of the 2027 budget bill, at least until someone wakes up.
I wish I were exaggerating. Amendment I-1358, tabled by Socialist MP Laurent Lhardit, had already been thrown out by the finance committee on 9 October. The budget rapporteur said no. The government said no, through David Amiel, the minister in charge of public accounts. It passed anyway, because on a late Friday in the Assembly, “no” is only worth as much as the people who bothered to show up.
How the France gigabyte tax is supposed to work
The mechanism is almost elegant in its laziness. Your ISP (Orange, Free, SFR, Bouygues) measures how much data each content provider pushes down its pipes to French users. Every quarter it hands those volumes to the tax office, with Arcep, the telecom regulator, supervising. The provider then pays €0.055 per gigabyte, capped at 15% of its French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue, whichever applies.
Supporters talk about anywhere between €5 billion and €10 billion a year, depending on who’s doing the back-of-the-envelope maths. Amiel himself pointed out that nearly half of the €5 billion figure wouldn’t come from American giants at all, but from smaller players. Which, if you think about it for two seconds, is exactly the problem.
Because “content provider” isn’t defined. A video stream is content. So is a game update, a Linux ISO, a Git clone, a backup to the cloud, a software patch. Lhardit’s own example involved TF1: streaming its five channels through operator boxes would cost the broadcaster, by his estimate, €200,000 to €300,000 a year. He presented that as reasonable. TF1 probably has a different adjective in mind.
VLC does the maths and it isn’t pretty
The reaction that stung the most came from VideoLAN, the Paris-based non-profit behind VLC. Their estimate: more than €1 million a year in tax, for software they give away for free and have never monetised. “The French socialists and Parliament members just voted for a tax they don’t understand,” they wrote on X, before wondering aloud whether these were “the most clueless politicians on Earth” and noting the irony of a Parliament that keeps talking about technological sovereignty.
Harsh? A bit. Wrong? Not really. VLC is one of the few pieces of French software the entire planet uses. Taxing its download traffic by the gigabyte is like taxing a library by the number of pages people read.
And then there’s the obvious question nobody in the room seemed to ask: who pays in the end? One commentator ran the numbers on a household pulling 500 GB a month. At 5.5 cents a gig, that’s €27.50 a month in tax somewhere upstream, €330 a year. The tax isn’t on you, technically. But Netflix, Spotify and Steam have never been shy about where cost increases land.
What happens next
Nothing is final. The 2027 budget still has to survive the rest of the Assembly debate, then the Senate, then whatever joint committee horror show follows. The government opposes it, the operators have every reason to fight it, and the EU has already spent two years kicking a similar “fair share” idea around Brussels without landing it. My bet is the amendment quietly dies in the Senate. But I said the same about France’s DNS blocking orders, and Quad9 ended up leaving the country.
If you run a service with French users, I’d keep an eye on this one. Not because it will pass as written, but because the idea now exists in a budget text, and bad ideas in budget texts have a way of coming back every autumn.
Taxing bytes to fund the State: finally, a reason to be grateful for compression.
Source: Univers Freebox — Netflix, YouTube, même TF1 bientôt taxés pour leur trafic
Image: Brett Sayles / Pexels
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