France's National Assembly voted a tax of €0.055 per gigabyte delivered to French internet subscribers, paid by whoever sends the data. It's a Socialist amendment to the 2027 budget, adopted 11 votes to 10, with a hoped-for yield of ~€10bn a year. Short thread on why I think it's a bad idea🧵
---
It taxes bytes, not value. A gigabyte of a Linux ISO costs the same as a gigabyte of Netflix. The sender pays for traffic the subscriber asked for and already pays their ISP to carry. To bill it, ISPs must attribute flows to an "emitting company", even behind a CDN; how is left to a decree.
And it isn't even "fair share": the money goes to the state budget, not to networks. OVHcloud estimates a bill of up to €70M a year, and puts €0.055/GB at 68% to 123% of what hyperscalers charge for outbound traffic. A tax on data delivery that can exceed the market price of data delivery.
VideoLAN got involved: the non-profit behind VLC gives software away to the whole world, and says this would cost it more than €1M a year. The text has no exemption for associations, free software or small senders, and no minimum volume. The only limit is a cap: "at most 15% of revenue made in France OR 2% of total revenue". Revenue, not profit. VideoLAN: "You don't understand the difference between Revenue and Profit. Nor what is a non-profit."
The author, Laurent Lhardit, replied that the tax is capped and "in your case, it wouldn't apply at all. Read the text." I did. There is no exemption. A cap limits a bill, it doesn't cancel it, and the text never says which of its two caps applies. At best, his answer rests on an "or" left open.
The amendment also gets technical basics wrong. It wants each sender's "registration number with IANA". IANA doesn't register companies: it hands AS number blocks to regional registries like RIPE NCC, and an AS identifies a network, not a sender. It also claims content providers don't compress "for now" because the network is "a pipe with no volume limit" for them. YouTube and Netflix have whole teams working on better codecs…
This is sloppy law-making and it shows a profound misconception of what the Internet is and how its ecosystem works. Do we need regulations? Yes. Should big players contribute more? I think so. But it needs to be done correctly with the input of the field specialists.
