French lawmakers approved a tax of €0.055 for every gigabyte of internet traffic

manarth

Additional discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50308240

duke_sam

This feels like a wildly scatter gun way of achieving their goals? The collateral damage will be huge and unpredictable

niemandhier

The uploading entity pays, even if not in France.

moezd

Doesn't France also have cloud infrastructure that offers similar products like AWS S3?

skinfaxi

So if you get DDoSed you can get another huge bill?

lifestyleguru

Tax your fooking billionaires.

mitxela

Another comment said it was just some posturing addition to a budget that's already guaranteed to be rejected. Which one is true?

mariopt

This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there. Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music. Just old people being old people.

adrian_b

The tax is huge. Fortunately, I do not live in France. Otherwise, this tax would cost me at least 50% of what I pay for all my food, daily. 50 GB of daily traffic is normal for me, sometimes even much more, e.g. one day ago I had a traffic of 1 TB per day, because I downloaded the Mistral Large LLM weights. So to download Mistral, I would have had to pay EUR 55, much more than I pay for a month of Internet access.

temp123477

What is the reason? Seems like absolute taxing the wrong thing. It is not attached to any cost for the government, not revenue or income directly and I can't see a reason to put people off using data (like you might do with pollution taxes) so why? (I don't speak or read French).

apt-get

Worth noting the vote for this law passed 11 to 10, and it's an amendment to the budget which is 100% likely to be thrown out anyway.

gregorygoc

Just stop transferring wealth to hoarding boomers and problems will solve themselves.

usr1106

The link seems to be the minutes of a parliamentary debate about a multitude of topics. It does not explain what this tax is about and I guess there is another approval step in the senate (French is neither my mother tongue nor am I fowolling French politics) That the current internet with social media and AI boom destroys democracies and the planet is a fact. Whether such tax is a good step to slow that down, I have not thought about.

bcvvvy

Back to Minitel it is!

Lucasoato

So I could troll French visitors of my website by starting a huge data transfer from their browser? Interesting...

kingleopold

vive la France!!! This will show companies not getting away with those GBs! Everyone should pay for extra, this will save republic for the next 100 years at least, increase it next year to 5€ at least

a_humean

So two ways to look at tax: 1) How it changes behaviour (taxing something usually means less of that thing is produced, and sometimes you want less of something e.g. smoking as a classic example) 2) How much revenue it raises for the treasury after taking into account 1 I cannot help but think that on both counts this is really bad. This seems like an absurdly high rate of taxation on a resource that if anything we want to increase the volume of. Creating disincentives for high speed/bandwidth connections and services surely means less economic activity net, which means lower revenues and profits to tax across multiple industries. You are creating very direct disincentives on economic activity in a very blunt way. Its not like you are say taxing online gambling activity which is a net social drain on society, this is everything digital/tech. I can understand that they want to maybe tax mainly foreign tech and media firms, but this seems like the worst way to go about it with a tax that would make up the bulk of the cost to serve.

foo12bar

Maybe it'll force the internet to go back to analog.

wernerb

This can be seen as a "look europe, we are trying to address our huge debt peoblem (which is 120% of gdp in 2026), please continue to help us". France as well as the French themselves do not want to address the extreme cost of their early pensions to their budget (25% of the 2026 budget!). The retirees and employees often get amazing perks from the government. Employees and retirees of EDF get a 90% discount on their gas and electric bill. 21% of the total workforce works for government... Meanwhile kids can't get a decent education, I would be pissed off too.

tornikeo

What the fuck is wrong with France? I remember, in 2025 friends that were into business said something along the lines of France being socially and economically doomed. I didn't know this much wrong could happen all at once. Just damn. Riots first. Now absurd laws.