WTF?! These days, moving a gigabyte of data across the internet usually costs companies well under a cent. France, however, wants them to pay several times that just in tax. Lawmakers there narrowly voted on Friday to charge content providers 5.5 cents for every gigabyte they send to French users – though the measure still has a long way to go before it becomes law.
Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit's amendment passed the National Assembly by just 11 votes to 10. In fact, only 35 of the chamber's 577 deputies were even in the room at the time. Both the government and the budget's own rapporteur had advised against it, too.
If it survives, subscribers wouldn't be billed directly. Instead, ISPs like Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free would tally how much data reaches their customers from each sender. Content providers would then owe €0.055 per gigabyte. That bill would be capped at 15% of French revenue or 2% of global revenue.
All told, Lhardit's group expects the tax to raise €10 billion a year. That figure leans on telecom regulator Arcep's estimate that about 200 billion gigabytes flow to French subscribers annually. Roughly half of that traffic comes from just five companies – Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai.
Budget minister David Amiel has his doubts, though. For one, he questioned whether the count could even work without flow sensors on networks or measurements taken on users' own devices. He also reckoned about half the bill would land on smaller content providers, many of them French. Meanwhile, VideoLAN, the French nonprofit behind VLC, warned it would be on the hook for more than €1 million a year.
For his part, Lhardit insists subscribers won't have to pay a thing. But Philippe Juvin, the budget's rapporteur, cautioned during the debate that the biggest platforms could simply pass the cost on to advertisers.
That kind of pass-through has already played out in France once. When its 3% digital services tax kicked in back in 2019, Amazon responded by raising fees for French marketplace sellers by 3%. Apple and Google later followed with higher charges for app developers and advertisers in the country.
If platforms pass the cost along again, the per-gigabyte math adds up quickly for games. Grand Theft Auto VI's reported 210 GB download alone would cost its distributor about €11.55 for every copy grabbed in France.
Before any of that matters, the tax still has to clear the Senate, where a conservative Les Républicains majority is unlikely to back it. Assembly president Yaël Braun-Pivet has also urged Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to force the budget through without a vote under Article 49.3. If he does, the government can simply leave the amendment out.
