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?
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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!