French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax

nick486

apologies for the article in French, but I found no English sources reporting this yet. It is totally ridiculous...

motbus3

If this is real, this is ridiculous. This would make most internet businesses even more unaccessible

zomtorg

The upside might be the return of CDs?

well_ackshually

Everyone hates the socialist party, episode 3825. It's okay, they're soon just a part of history and the left will be better off without them.

cmiles8

As if France doesn’t need even more ways to regulate itself into global irrelevance. Maybe focus on the riots in the streets and sort that out vs wasting energy on nonsense like this. Just saying.

antisthenes

That's an exorbitant amount per GB. I guess at least it's capped somewhat? Is there more background preceding this legislation? This seems as ridiculous as having 1TB internet caps for residential ISPs in 2026.

netsharc

From the translation; to be paid by the content providers, with a cap of 15% of their income in France or 2% of their global income. Dear Netflix, my startup is Uber but for carrier pigeons. Carrying SD cards! With AI-optimized routing because I gotta mention AI somewhere...

Youden

So for a download of the newest Call of Duty, you'd need to pay 6.33 EUR? Not for the purchase but the download ? What is up with France?

ObnoxiousProxy

We really need to start building out a fully P2P internet.

rdm_blackhole

Obviously this is bonkers even for the French but just note that this can still be dropped by the senate. Not saying that this is not a stupid law nonetheless.

miohtama

It’s about to kill VideoLan foundation (VLC): https://x.com/videolan/status/2116229135919919278?a=5Ua5pSOr...

hommelix

How are they going to meter the traffic? Trust Netflix to report the numbers? (Pinky promise this is the true number;-)) Or request French ISP to monitor and analyze the traffic to know what went to which server?

0x_rs

EU and European countries are rent-seeking apparatuses whose only purpose is ensuring the status quo. Italy attempted to tax free cloud storage offered by providers such as Google, etc. to customers along with their own paid storage -- private storage is also, of course, taxed on purchase, for all hardware: from 5 to 30€ depending on capacity and intended use, because the citizen is automatically presumed to store copyrighted material on them.

MayeulC

Uh, I didn't see that coming. 8Gbps is deployed on most of the territory, that's potentially 5.5 cents/s, or about 200€/hour. Probably 1 or 2 orders of magnitude too high to be painless. Given that the content providers (CDNs) are targeted, that would incentivize p2p. P2P networks are already employed by Microsoft to distribute updates, for instance. What about CDNs? The article mention Valve, but their traffic comes from Akamai. In any case, I would be surprised if this law ends up being adopted.

elikoga

The French state might as well not exist anymore at this point. It's like the last breaths of a dying man

Youden

I asked Claude for some context and while I'm hesitant to simply parrot its claims, they seem reasonable: This passed late at night with an 11 to 10 vote (the entire assembly is 577 people). Odd amendments like this apparently pass somewhat frequently in similar ways. Even though it passed, it's likely to be killed by the more right-wing parties when it gets to the senate.

carlosjobim

The worst part of this is that now everybody who writes comments on Hacker News will violently insist that every company and individual in the world has to pay this tax and that you'll be in big trouble if you don't. I've already had enough endless discussions with people saying that the US government will jail and fine US individuals on the behalf of France and Germany if they don't put cookie banners on their websites...

johen8

I mean, I always try to see things through another point of view, but 0.055 euros per GB is just crazy. GTA is estimated to be 210GB, so to download it 1 time it would cost you 11 EUR, that's more than 10% the price of the product. Politicians are completely drifting apart from reality

dinkblam

If you are looking for the silliest legislations worldwide you can save time by just looking at France

maxdo

ok, so if i want to just update the game i already paid, i need to pay again?