Policy

France Moves to Tax Every Gigabyte at 5.5 Euro Cents, Alarming VLC

co-produced by AI31. October 2026, 08:44

A bundle of glowing fiber optic cables — Fiber optic cables. © Denny Müller/Unsplash

France has found a new way to get at the money of Netflix, Google and others: It simply counts the gigabytes. On Friday, the National Assembly voted 11 to 10 to adopt an amendment by the Socialists to the 2027 budget that would impose a tax of €0.055 per gigabyte. It would be paid by the companies that send data to internet users in France. The authors, led by the lawmaker Laurent Lhardit, expect it to raise €10 billion a year.

How the Gigabyte Tax Would Work

The basis is an estimate by the telecom regulator Arcep: About 200 billion gigabytes flow to the customers of French internet service providers every year. According to the amendment, half of that comes from just five companies: Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and the cloud provider Akamai.

Who pays: The tax applies to the “producers” of the data, meaning providers of content and services.
Measurement: Internet providers such as Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free would record the volume of data sent to their customers and identify the sender. The anonymized, aggregated figures would go to the tax authority once a quarter, with Arcep overseeing the process.
Content delivery networks: If traffic runs through a CDN that caches content close to users, the total amount of data leaving that network counts.
Cap: The tax may not exceed 15 percent of the sender’s revenue in France or 2 percent of its global revenue.
Privacy: According to the amendment, only the quantity of data is measured, and the content itself is never accessed.

VLC Fears Costs of More Than €1 Million

The sharpest reaction came from a French open-source project. VideoLAN, the nonprofit behind the VLC media player, warned that 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,” VideoLAN wrote on X. “They are probably the most clueless politician on Earth? And they claim they want technological sovereignty.”

The math is simple: At 5.5 cents per gigabyte, €1 million corresponds to about 18 million gigabytes, or roughly 18 petabytes a year. For a program with billions of downloads, that is plausible. The amendment does not say, however, how the cap of 15 percent or 2 percent of revenue would apply to a nonprofit with little revenue to speak of.

The sums get even bigger for games. According to Steam’s download statistics, users in France downloaded 62.7 petabytes over the past seven days. Under the gigabyte tax, that would amount to about €3.4 million a week, or roughly €180 million a year for Steam traffic alone. A 200-gigabyte game would carry €11 in tax per download. And an average fixed-line connection, which according to Arcep handles about 267 gigabytes a month, would theoretically generate almost €15 in tax a month.

The Government and the Budget Committee Opposed It

The amendment passed by the narrowest of margins. Only 35 lawmakers were present, and 21 voted, according to the French tech publication Next. The 11 votes in favor came from the Socialists, La France Insoumise, the Greens and the left-wing GDR group. The finance committee had rejected the amendment in early October.

The government opposed it, too. David Amiel, the budget minister, questioned whether the data flows could be measured without installing dedicated sensors on operators’ networks or measuring directly on users’ devices. He also argued that half of the tax would fall on smaller content providers, many of them French. Philippe Juvin, the finance committee’s general rapporteur, warned of a different effect: The big tech companies could pass the burden of the tax on to advertisers, he said.

Companies passing new levies on to customers is a familiar pattern. Amazon, for example, is passing a new parcel tax on to its customers in full. Critics expect the gigabyte tax to bring pricier subscriptions or lower streaming quality as providers try to cut data volumes. For comparison: The wholesale price of transmitting a gigabyte is usually below one cent, according to industry estimates, making the tax a multiple of that.

Why the Socialists Are Betting on Gigabytes

The amendment’s authors see it differently. Their core argument: The traditional economy, with shops, factories and employees in France, pays taxes because its tax base is physically located in the country. Global tech companies sell to the same customers and use the same infrastructure, but they pay taxes on a self-declared profit that they book wherever it suits them best. Data sent to French households, by contrast, cannot be shifted abroad.

The Socialists also see an environmental benefit. Because every gigabyte would cost money, providers would have an incentive to compress data more efficiently and reduce volumes. According to the amendment, the measurement technology already exists, and the method was developed with industry specialists. In contrast to the European “fair share” debate, in which telecom companies want Big Tech to pay for their networks, the French revenue would go directly into the state budget.

What Happens Next

The gigabyte tax is still a long way from becoming law. The amendment was adopted in the first reading; next up is the Senate, where the conservative Republicans hold a majority and are unlikely to back the tax. On top of that, it is unclear whether the budget will find a majority at all. Yaël Braun-Pivet, the president of the National Assembly, has already urged Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to push the budget through without a vote under Article 49.3. In that case, the government could simply drop the gigabyte amendment from the text.