French digital tax may kill VideoLan non-profit

claude-ai

The stupidity of European politicians is that extreme, it cannot be explained away by assuming a lack of education. I was never a conspiracy theorist, but the discrepancy between "That's something an educated person should understand" and what they are actually doing is that large I cannot bridge it mentally. This may be a defect of mine, it probably is, but I have no but.

yesfitz

Here's a link to the amendment: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/... I don't have an X account, so I can't see the conversation, but there don't appear to be any carveouts for non-profits or small businesses in the amendment, unless perhaps "any company offering an internet access service to households and businesses" has more criteria in context than a simple reading would suggest. I wonder how distribution via torrent would be accounted for. Or if it would be worth it for larger players to adopt such a model, or just pay up or exit France.

draugadrotten

That Laffer curve is going to hit France in the gonads.

Scaevolus

Paying 0.055 EUR per GB of traffic sent to French residents makes video streaming fundamentally unprofitable.

api

My big fear about right wing politicians is corruption and authoritarian right assaults on women and minorities. My big fear about left wing politicians is well intentioned stupidity.

juancn

France is desperate. They have a deficit problem, they cannot print money and people really don't want to give up their pensions. Unless the curb public spending they are heading to a hard crash (and will probably take a couple other economies for the ride).

ChrisArchitect

Discussion: French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50308240

mitxela

Nitter link: https://twiiit.com/videolan/status/2116229135919919278 How can I see an English translation?

MayeulC

I mean, the law is stupid, but as one of the commenters there says, there is a 2% revenue (profit?) cap, and I don't think that VideoLAN makes a lot of revenue.

eclipticplane

Wait, why is VideoLan hit by this? Do they stream content themselves?

PowerElectronix

They will tax everyone for everything before they even contemplate controlling their spending.

indiantinker

This was expected. France is in a lot of debt trouble and it’s highly alarming development for Eurozone. Unlike the US, France cannot print more Euros to stay afloat and the ECB, who can, is institutionally hand-cuffed to not do so. Its chief just quit in a seemingly related situation but optically unrelated way.

paxy

This is the most hilarious thing I have ever read. Part of me wants this law to go into effect just to watch an entire country send itself back to 1988 to try and compy with it. Summary of n°I-1358: - It's a tax on internet "content", but they haven't defined what that means exactly, so by default it would apply to all internet traffic. - Bytes delivered to French users by ISPs are taxed (but not user uploads). - ISPs are responsible for tracking exactly where every GB originates from and will have to report the names to the government. - The "content provider" then has to pay 0.055 EUR per GB that they sent. - No explanation for how user-to-user traffic is handled. No explanation for what ISP -> user means (e.g. does P2P count)? No details on how ISPs will track the upstream source. About a million other similar questions are unanswered. - The amendment was adopted today, and the assembly will vote on it as part of their full budget (but there are still many stages left before it can become law). Even by government standards this is way too idiotic to actually come into effect.

jszymborski

This is an exceedingly dumb tax. A more reasonable tax would be one for storing user data. That would make PII a liability, not something you hold on to forever in hopes of selling to some scammy third party when you fold.

_ache_

This law is crazy. The "French socialists" are really disconnected to any reality, they don't even exists as a political force currently. To be fair, it's limited to what a "business" make as money. So it should exclude associations (which are not allowed to make money in France). But yes, it's really a stupid law.