French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax
lesnumeriques.com
lesnumeriques.com
Now there will be a bit of news coverage, some opinion polls and the politics will assess if this is worth blaming tech giants for the current social unrest.
[1] Actually, seated in their seats! There is a detector and if they are standing they don't count as present.
Here we require 50%+ present and to partially approve the law 50%+ of the present. So sniping correctly, a 25% is enough.
There is a weird iteration, when on party ensure 49% of the total of positive votes. Sometimes they have a dubious 3% of the votes of abstention from other parties that is a shame/hidden way to vote in favor. The 48% MP of the other party hide nearby while there is only 49% present, but if the 3% appear then they must rush in and vote against.
49% yes --> not aproved
49% yes + 3% abstention --> aproved
49% yes + 3% abstention + 48% no --> not aproved
I'd prefer 50%+ of the total for everything. (Note that 50% is required for some special topics, so it's not ridiculous to ask it for everything.)
Then there is the whole "they literally never decolonized out of africa" just to keep the economy going this long and that is unable to be exploited like in the past.
They cut the kid's programs to the bone and the kids told them in the most french way possible that that was bad. Inequality has been worse than 1789 for years now.
Dont see that working in the long run
It's not a surprise that if you tax something, the price usually goes up.
A tax is usually applied to help facilitate maintenance for something you are using. Or to disincentivize "bad" behavior. For example i pay taxes in the US that directly help pay for public schools, the fire department, roads, etc.
How does the french government bear any cost if i download data from a data center? What bad behavior is disincentivezed with this tax?
Oh yeah you also have to not kill the population economically. What about the citizens who are doing large scale research on datasets? Those are the ones who are going to make billion dollar companies and they wont happen if they are watching the meter all the time because the government has decided to tax thought, so better not think too much!
Note that this amendment to the law was passed with 11 votes for, 10 no... With a national assembly of 577. I have to assume it was voted at night, that's when peak democracy happens.
What’s more fun is that while france is teetering on the brink, it’s hardly alone, and it’s collapse will tip the dominoes.
Something to look forward to, I guess.
See ~2008 onwards:
https://countryeconomy.com/national-debt/france
https://countryeconomy.com/national-debt/uk
It can be our children's problem !
It's not great, but it's not even clearly worse than the situation Greece survived. https://think.ing.com/articles/carsten-intro/
Be fair, sometimes it's communist revolution.
As evidenced by the fact that Trump achieved basically nothing and has plunged us into the worst case scenario on behalf of Israel and probably Russia - and yet the proposed solutions in Europe are: AfD, FN, Reform - all Zionist and Russian cucks who don't have an answer but know how to point at problems.
I see a few politicians like Bernie _genuinely_ attempt to talk to the other side, _genuinely_ admit that yes some mass migration is used for wage suppression and thats bad. We frame all our political issues in ways that do not engage the other side (both sides guilty of this) and then we wonder why populists sweep.
One economist wrote, before the first Euro even circulated: "The euro will lead to too many public servants in France, too many industries in Germany, too many vacation houses in Spain [1], the default of Spain on its public debt and then the default of Greece on its public debt".
When Greece, not Spain, defaulted on its public debt, that same economist: "I was only wrong about the order of defaults of Greece and Spain".
The Euro, he predicted, would be one of the shortest lived currency in the history of currencies.
His name is Charles Gave and he's gotta be 80 y/o old now. Of course people are going to hate on him and spill all their hatred on him because he's neither a communism nor a socialist.
And then idiots are going to say that "euro is great because I can travel and pay in the same currency everywhere". As if they're own little convenience warranted the disaster that we're heading into because ideologues, not economists, decided to force a currency down the throat of most european citizens.
[1] btw there are many protests in Spain now because "costs of rents are too high" (yeah, no shit: there's a gigantic number of empty houses and apartment in Spain belonging to foreigners, who only come a few weeks per year).
California, for example.
I probably should have quoted this part too. I was replying to the whole comment about the changing winds of politics. The economics is just one of the symptoms.
Austerity is what got France in this mess in the first place + the Euro.
This movie has already happened in Greece.
Greece's former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on the European economic policy during the Euro crisis:
"When I met Christine Lagarde for the first time — she was the managing director of the International Monetary Fund at the time, before she moved over to the presidency of the European Central Bank — she astounded me, because she was extremely sympathetic to my analysis of what had gone wrong and why the austerity programs could not work.
She said, “Of course, Yanis, they cannot work — you’re right.” She actually criticized me from a position to the left of my own thinking because she said that I was being too modest and too moderate in what I was demanding on behalf of my people.
However, she then added immediately, “But Yanis, you have to understand that we have put a lot of political capital into this program, and your career and mine both depend on going along with it.” "
On the Euro: “Look, we created the euro in a terrible way. The architecture was as if we had designed it in order to fail. It was clear from the very beginning. Think about it. We created a central bank for twenty countries. The central bank didn’t have a treasury, and there were twenty treasuries that didn’t have a central bank.”
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/07/12/jacobins-on-the-le...
I kept posting about it here over the years but at officially 57% of the GDP being public spending (and the actual percentage is bigger than that because a great many of the "private" companies that are monopolies are basically owned by state apparatchiks), France is already a planned economy.
And there's only one outcome for planned economies and its misery.
And when socialists succeed in establishing misery, they've guaranteed themselves an endless stream of voters. And they can only drive the country more into the ground. So more misery. So more socialism. So more planned economy.
France "offered" fiber optic to the entire country (at taxpayers' expense) and now that people have big Internet pipes, they're going to implement Bill Gates' old dream [1]: tax every single packet of information.
What's up with France is socialism. That's what up with France.
[1] in a leaked memo when the Internet began to take off, Bill Gates explained he wanted to tax every single network packet (for those who remember).
> A cap on the tax is planned to take into account sectors with a high ratio of data emitted per euro of turnover, such as video on demand or video games.
https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
I don't see the appeal of these modern games.
https://x.com/videolan/status/2116229135919919278?a=5Ua5pSOr...
get.videolan.org
Either very, it this tax story is true, it is completely rediculous and signifies complete desparation by France.
See "tax incidence". Sales taxes are paid by businesses, and yet.
Such a tax would be the end of any kind of free downloads and of any kind of non-profit content providers.
> There is a cap so that services using a lot of bandwidth but earning slimmer margins are not crushed. The amount charged cannot exceed 15% of revenue earned in France, or 2% of worldwide revenue. Besides raising money, the authors present the tax as ...
How much does the VideoLan foundation make from France, as revenue?
Edit: I think I've figured it out. The hosting services would need to pay, and they get taxed based on their revenue, and they would probably pass the extra cost on to their consumers, which would include non-profits like the VideoLan foundation.
Dear Netflix, my startup is Uber but for carrier pigeons. Carrying SD cards! With AI-optimized routing because I gotta mention AI somewhere...
It feels absurd to punish data heavy companies. What a weird proxy disciminator. Makes so little sense.
Also though, perhaps we see YouTube and others not just adopting & making available but pushing AV2 much faster! "YouTube AV2 streams will be available for Web as soon as early 2027." And perhaps resolutions dropping precipitously too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50244283 http://aomedia.org/press%20releases/AOMedia-Rapid-AV2-Adopti...
This is part of the net-0 narrative and the degrowth movement that's been growing(no pun intended) in Europe. Nevermind that growth in the EU is already pretty low to begin with...
In the spirit of radical misunderstanding I assume this ridiculous proposition is continuing to be foisted upon people. A "Badhearts Law" (riffing Goodheart's "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") if you will: finding a bad measure to make bad accusations.
(The idea that AI is going to pay a heavy tax or even medium tax for this seems like some super wishful thinking.)
Does anyone really believe that said content providers won't pass this to their customers?
I don't know if this is one of those cases but governments are generally trying to figure out how to avoid such transfers away of tax revenue.
that could be done directly by taxing IP licensing directly
Combined with universal suffrage and the welfare state to buy votes it is a recipe for decline and ruin.
The french state is bankrupt like all the other western democracies. They hide their pension obligations well, but that doesn’t change reality.
This system will continue to suck everything it can out of the young and the productive, because those are the incentives. There is no point at which it will stop, short of regime change.
Edit: I apologize to the French people. I did not intend to disrespect your innovations or appropriate your legislature.
The best part is that this year they've added smartphones, tablets and laptops to the list of taxed devices, which is ridiculous and pure greed. And the minister argued that the manufacturers will bear the increased cost themselves, which just adds insult to injury. She also said that other countries do that already (Germany was the example AFAIR, hehe), but she just conveniently left out the fact that Poland already has one of the highest VAT rates in the EU, so our devices will be even more expensive relative to their base price, than they already are.
If you live in a country where you pay $400 in taxes but all healthcare is paid for by the government, you are better off than someone living in a country where they have to pay only $300 in taxes - but an additional $200 for private health insurance just to cover what you get for "free".
Also, I don't know if that is true in this case, but these numbers will often omit state taxes for the US and only like at federal taxes. Ie they leave the US looking better than it is.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
The IMF puts the US at 37.92%, but France at 57.17%.
If you graph these values over the 20th century you should become quite worried. It turns out that a lot of our "good times" coincide with a slow but perpetual increase in this number. But this number will have to stop increasing at some point and we're reaching that point.
From the article:
>Total tax revenues (federal, state, and local) as a percentage of GDP for OECD countries.
>If you graph these values over the 20th century you should become quite worried.
I agree that US debt is a real issue. But:
* The data indicates that, if necessary, the US has a (lot) more room to raise taxes.
* US GDP grew by 3.4% <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/business/economy/us-econo...> in 3Q2026, beating estimates. French GDP shrank by 0.1% <https://www.france24.com/en/business/20261030-french-economy...> in 3Q2026, worse than estimates.
* Put another way, it is possible to grow out of debt. The US is the only member of the $40 trillion debt club, but is also the only member of the $32 trillion GDP club. Scott Bessent has been talking since before being named Treasury Secretary about 3/3/3. <https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/treasury-secretary-nomi...>
* Put yet another way, if you are so worried about the US, you should be sounding a five-alarm bell for France and Italy, and three alarms for most of the rest of the developed world.
I'm not talking about debt.
I'm talking about the 20th century being one of constant progress. Life got better and better, which created a feeling of progress and hope. However, this progress happened while we were constantly increasing the share of taxes. Eventually we will reach a point where we simply cannot increase taxes anymore. Will it be possible to have the kind of hope and progress we had over the past century even if our taxes can't keep going up and up? Or will we devolve into trying to "nickel & dime" everything through politics?
And yes, my commentary is about the world, because we are all heading in the same direction on this. This isn't something you can grow an economy out of.
even if content providers are paying - it still inhibits consumption as content providers simply pass the cost to the consumer.
imagine netflix vs megaupload. megaupload or any of those or torrents - they could be registered entities or none but they r not gonna pay. consumers will simply get their content from those sites vs the official ones.
show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome as charlie munger said.
Not saying that this is not a stupid law nonetheless.
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...
There is going to be a problem with everyone trying to register an address block. The internet addressing scheme isn't designed for many tiny networks and you'd have to use sub-blocks of a big block, but then someone owns the big block and gets held liable for the use of the whole block and therefore for the whole P2P system.
I always found it interesting what the direction of the data has been in this dystopia, might not be signficantly interpretable (as in, "capitalism mainly uses the internet to blast propaganda and ads" instead of "capitalism uses the internet to spy on the citizens"), because the up/downstream direction of data will probably be dominated by video, so the direction only tells us which way video is going, and it makes sense that corps want to send videos, but consumers are more apprehensive about sending huge volumes of theirs.
But in general, it does seem to be that as time goes by, the corporations seem to be less interested in receiving messages, as opposed to sending messages. Maybe a decade or two ago virality was this interesting organic phenomenon that emerged and was followed by the companies, nowadays it seems to be more of them controlling what is viral and what is not, preferring to distribute a unified message.
Interestingly a tax on consumer bandwidth would not deter peering and huge volumes of traffic on the backend, so I feel it would greatly deter edge caching, which relies on reducing traffic distance instead of end-user traffic. I'd assume that at least video would be a bit less top-heavy and more indie/personal. That said, that's just video, the rest of the media forms will probably be unaffected by such a tax, 5 cents per GB is only relevant to video.
But obviously, this is the reality of a consumer Internet. We all want to download and install software, and we want to consume media, watch Netflix/YouTube, and generally read web pages rather than write them, or produce videos or upload massive amounts of content. It's typically been beyond our resources, as consumers, to produce any appreciable amount of uploads that are worth contributing.
However, and this chills me to the bone to think about it, but now AIs have democratized the production of content, and so anyone who can afford a few tokens can absolutely generate mounds of spam, whether it's walls-of-text or fake music or hours of video content that they didn't need to write, produce, or edit. Hollywood can produce mass amounts of crap every year, but salaries are still paid and audiences still pay, in order to say how much they hated every minute.
So if you think about it, the commercial consumer Internet may be at a precipice where, all of a sudden, everyone begins contributing beyond their means, and it's all slop that needs to be gated and throttled and rate-limited. Furthermore, it won't be monetizable or copyrightable; people will just fill up social media storage with streams of consciousness where nobody cares. Nobody would miss it if it were deleted or shadowbanned.
The DOCSIS is a good start; I mean I'm behind 100Mbps/12Mbps nominally, so I should only be able to contribute 1/10th of what I'm consuming, currently. But do we really want a truly P2P Internet, where everyone is just shoveling slop at everyone else? Really?
Reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 2 where the AI is talking about humans getting overloaded with data, and requiring an AI to curate it into information.
This video goes into it, especially around the 13:20 mark:
Does the French state believe that its sole purpose is to extract money from any possible source for the sake of it?
Yes. French taxes are 43.5% of GDP in 2024, the second highest among OECD countries. <https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/oecd-taxes-share-gdp> US is 25.6%; Germany is 38%; Britain is 34.4%; Canada is 34.9%.
I believe they did the same thing last year. Everyone did their own pet amendments, claimed victories. And then when it was time to vote for the budget with all the amendments, the assembly unanimously voted against, scraping the whole thing.
But at the same time the tax is capped at 15% of the providing company's French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue, and realistically speaking, not all companies would pass the tax on to the users, so it could end up being a noticeable but not catastrophic additional expense for both users and companies, if the bill passes at all, that is.
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.
It doesnt really matter. The damage is already done.
Macron tried to turn France (unsuccessfully one might say) into a country that is open to tech businesses. This law amongst other things (record tax rates, record deficit, weak economic growth, political instability, riots and much more) is simply another signal that opening a business in France today is just too risky and this will impact future growth for sure.
You have countries that look to the future and invest in it and then you have France.
Now, in my opinon, the major issue with opening a business (regardless of the country) is that it is costly to do so, even if there are tax and state incentives. It's much easier to create a startup when seed funding is available.
I don't think I can agree with you on that:
> On Oct. 21, French Economy Minister Roland Lescure said in an interview that the violence and unrest had caused “tens or perhaps hundreds of millions” of euros worth of damage.
Seems like overblown is not exactly the appropriate word here. Not too mention the the loss of reputation which could keep future tourists away from France, the loss of revenue from the shops that have had to close since they did not want to be looted or burned down and finally the loss of trust in the state's ability to maintain order.
> the major issue with opening a business (regardless of the country)
Well it is especially hard in France considering the record tax rates that France is imposing on its citizens. The cost to actually employ someone is high compared to many countries in the OECD.
Furthermore, the inability to reform the state to restore competitiveness won't improve in the near future whoever wins the presidency next year.
Maybe focus on the riots in the streets and sort that out vs wasting energy on nonsense like this. Just saying.
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.
That said, we do have the Germans as neighbours who are pretty damn skilled too.
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.