French digital tax may kill VideoLan non-profit
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How so? If you're paying a few EUR to watch a movie there's should be plenty of profit left.
720p AV1 is about 700mb/hr, so about an order of magnitude less than your 7GB/hour.
It's not like a 720p limit for tax reasons is any worse than a 720p limit for lack-of-Widevine-support reasons.
A GTA 6 download is estimated to be 210 GB. Under this law the publisher or storefront will have to pay an extra 11.5 EUR per copy in tax. And not just for a sale, but for every download.
Got the latest Apple security update? Think about whether it is really worth paying a couple bucks to install it.
Maybe this would teach the publisher some "computer science". /s
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.
The way this tax looks it just means you have to exclude French people from the internet. This won't work.
1) fully not-in-France remote businesses like SAAS companies
2) ad-supported business (e.g. tax Google, but not the ads they sell in France, but all the impressions they get (and pay out to someone else or to themselves) due to French people)
You see what I mean. Tax both sides, like they already do for French companies in France.
They should tax ads then. Since that's the source of money that fuels everything they should tax at the source.
Make the companies report how many ads they run, how much they get paid on that and tax that.
You won't catch them all initially but you'll catch some and then you can gradually tighten the system.
And this will go far enough from the consumer that he might actually not notice. Ad budgets of companies are very flexible and if you hit all of them, they'll all just reduce their ad spending at no harm to anyone.
That's what they're trying to do. The problem is that the person paying for the ads is not in France (and has no presence in the EU at all), and the person in France isn't paying for the service (like Google search, or ChatGPT), so there "is nothing to tax".
And then there's the Irish problem ...
yes, somewhat sarcastic - but the point being, they DID seem to understand the stupidity, and thus the long-way around approach: ISP -> classifies the origin and reports to govt -> then presumably govt sends a tax notice to the origin?
If you do it at the ISP level, it is very obvious that it is the consumer that will pay because the monthly bill will increase of the same amount.
This is why you have the current proposal, because in their twisted mind, the rich digital giants will foot the bill of any tax without the customer paying anything.
The parliamentary responsible for that even said "the customer will not pay anything because Facebook is free".
To be noted that there are also to additional factor pushing for that on the political side:
- Here we have "unlimited" plan on almost anything, and ISP have to compete so no one can go back to "per-giga" plan to be able to extract more income. So ISP are lobbying hard for such laws that could allow them to have a good excuse to stop unlimited plans all at the same time.
- The political group that are pushing that are quite retarded, and they have an ecological agenda that is totally unscientific. And so they are really like thinking that they act for the environment because when you watch a youtube video dolphins are dying and if you have thousands of emails in your mailbox, you pollute as much as doing a round trip flight between Paris and NewYork. So consuming "data" is bad because it is like consuming physical products...
I don't have VideoLan's internal metrics, but if they're saying it'll cost them millions they're saying they deliver over ~18tb (or ~36tb for a tax of 2million) to french peeps per year
This is supposed to let the French tax authorities collect 20B in additional tax revenue.
And yes, I don't see how Youtube (or Facebook, or Tiktok, or Netflix, or even something like Steam ...) can operate with such a tax in France.
Who pays the tax in 'anonymous' p2p schemes?
If I upload to a french server from a ukranian server that I seed through a swiss based VPN using a norwegian seedbox that I paid a friend for in cash, how does the french government bill me? Do they subpoena the ukranian server to see where the data come from? Does the swiss government, not seeing any legal issue with my data, comply and hand over my norwegian server? Does the norwegian seedbox provider or my friend at the company foot the bill because they've no record of me?
What about networking stacks in which the requester can't necessarily identify where the data genuinely originated? Suppose I torrent a genuine Linux ISO in france. Do all of the peers get fractional bills? Or is it on the distro maintainer? What if the data didn't really originate from any of the peers but was fetched for me by the peers and the peers don't tell me (or therefore the ISPs) where they got the data from?
What if I put, say, VLC in an encrpyted zip. The ISP and therefore the french gov would see this as data coming from me since it doesn't hash as VLC, but they also can't prove that it came from me if I demonstrate that it was actually downloaded from a forum.
What about anonymous data? If 4chan is mirroring images for me that I uploaded from a McDonalds and a french frog downloads it, how do I get a bill? Does 4chan eat the bill or forward it to the McDonalds? Does the McDonalds eat the bill or hire a tech to cross-reference cameras and IP logs? What if I paid for the food in cash? Do they check some mythical "who owns this laptop" database provided by google/meta/microsoft? What if my laptop isn't in those databases? The local McDonalds is forced to foot the bill as they can't provide a patsie?
If I send a friend a video on via facebook messenger, who foots the bill? Facebook didn't send the data, I did. Is facebook going to rewrite it's eula to allow them to bill me for "woops your friend was in france at the time"?
This may all seem like hand-waving what-aboutism, but there are legitimate questions at hand. If public data is expensive and there are routes that do not result in billing, why would anyone choose the expensive route for any reason other than ignorance of the free route? If those who know would choose the free route, how is france going to collect all, most, or any of their booty?
But in general, I must say that's something I really wonder about. Because what Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) did was also very large scale violation of copyright law, with technically even also includes tax evasion (they didn't pay authors, and had they paid them, they would have had to registers VAT on that amount). And they did it before that became legal, so they took a risk that could have resulted in very very large criminal sentences. And now we're of course seeing that the justice system isn't fair and won't destroy billionnaires just because they commit large scale violation of the law. But I do wonder: how do you decide to do this. Copyright violations have gotten sentences of up to 2 months plus 50,000 in damages PER INFRACTION. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Bill Gates all had their companies commit literally hundreds of millions of infractions against these laws to get their models started, knowing full well it was illegal ... AFTERWARDS congress has declared it's kind-of allowed (yes, really via a specific organization so that congress can claim they didn't do anything, but it was congress power being used to do it) ... but ... 50000 times hundreds of millions ... if congress had acted differently the punishments would have destroyed any billionnaire's fortune. How do you take such a risk? I don't understand.
Clearly: billionnaires get protected and small authors (frankly even quite big ones) got universally fucked. That's the net effect and 100% intentional. What I can't understand is WHY. If this had been put up to a democratic vote, it seems to me guaranteed billionnaires would have been convicted.
Btw: BOTH US AND EU have declared it legal, which I also wonder how that happens. But please don't start with "that's how the US works", or "of course Trump". I mean I see that too, but every important country leader could have stopped that change, including pretty far leftist figures like Pedro Sanchez could have stopped the EU from accepting this. They didn't.
I bet they can also cut a lot of politicians and designated positions, but I'm not that deluded to think they would.
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.
This is the current one.
I haven't done french since high school. So totally chatgpt and google translate reading this to me, but I really don't get what VideoLAN has to do with this.
The law is crazy with a €55/TB tax on ingress to France (including local cdns). But it's got nothing to do with your video player.
> A tax is established based on the flows of digital data emitted by content providers and paid by the latter
> When a data emitter uses a content delivery network to cache content near end users, the amount of data emitted is considered equal to the sum of the outgoing flows from the delivery network
Imagine paying €8 to download Balder's gate 3 lol.
https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
the text menstions several times that internet providers are the one in charge of collecting and paying the tax, i don't see how the softwares enabling the streaming/download would be under threat?
- content providers and application providers
- providers of both content and applications
I don't think that the first interpretation has a leg though, because of the remaining of the text.
French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax
The separate internet tax on the other hand, that's about 1000% of the cost of internet, and a 1000% tax is definitely on the wrong side of the laffer curve. They are essentially banning the internet.
This may be a defect of mine, it probably is, but I have no but.
Edit: why would VLC or any online company stay in France?
IIRC all the people involved with VLC are French and live in France. They might want to stay in their native country where they speak the language, have families, have the right to remain and vote etc etc.
But with kids in school, relatives close by, and family links in the city and region whre we live, moving somewhere else is not yet on the cards no matter how large the tax bill and unsettled the politics - at least for the moment.
I've been watching Iceland news, along with machine translation of Icelandic.
Right now, they're increasing taxes on parking, toll roads, 30% increase on hotels and B&B's, and per-kilometer driving tax.
It's insane the amount of taxes on taxes on taxes. And foreigners not in the know are about to get whalloped for $1000 extra around the ring road.
Sure, Iceland isn't EU proper. But they are Schengen along with other alliances. EU complaint stands, given they tax tax tax tax.
>Right now, they're increasing taxes on parking,
Great! Less car-centric infrastructure.
>toll roads
Great! Less cars.
>and per-kilometer driving tax
Great! Less cars on the road.
>And foreigners not in the know are about to get whalloped for $1000 extra around the ring road.
Which is probably the point (same with the hotel tax), if I had to guess? I mean Iceland gets a lot of tourists, and they have no obligation to provide free roads to everyone. In fact, they have a beautiful country, so if they can, they should capitalize on it. How is this a proof that "The stupidity of European politicians is that extreme, it cannot be explained away by assuming a lack of education" (the original claim)? They're doing their job.
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).
The french government is who decided the french government has to pay all that money, they can just decide differently.
Could you elaborate how France is "giving all the money to billionaires"?
They arent the ones driving up pensions for the retired, or instituting the anti-growth policies.
Like I said, kill every single one and the problem would still be there.
https://www.ipp.eu/publication/note-ipp-n92-quels-impots-les...
The question wasn't "does every billionaire pay the top marginal tax rate", it was: could you elaborate how France is "giving all the money to billionaires"? which was the OP's claim.
If this was true, it'd be simple for your ilk to answer it directly. Since it's not, you lie, misdirect, and shift the goalposts around in defense of the original lie, viciously attacking straw men that you erected.
France gives no money to billionaires. Even if you think their tax rate should be higher, those billionaires pay billions into a system that's managed to bankrupt itself through massive spending on general entitlements. You could take every billionaire in France to the guillotine, steal 100% of their wealth, and it'd fund the French government for less than two years. Spending must go down.
Can you be a bit more polite? i.e. I am polite despite the fact you're often carrying water for the "top 0.1%" in your comments, for an unknown reason.
What do you mean when you say "capitalism"?
1) paying money to billionnaires cost 67B euros, let's say 10% more this year, to 73B (interest on debt so France can keep lending 170B more every year)
2) not paying money to billionnaires costs 170B euros (france needs 170B euros in new debt every year to balance the books)
Oh and of course when it does become worth doing, stealing the public debt, there is still the little matter of needing to get French people to do 250B worth of extra labor without paying them 1 cent extra (if they kick the can down the road, which they will, it should settle on about that amount per year). Essentially French people will have to work 1/6th harder one way or the other. But by paying billionnaires they can wait with that another 4 years.
Or, you know, they could work 1/30th extra now. 11 days per year. But that means not kicking the can down the road.
Similar figures for all EU countries (except Germany, for the moment at least), but they get to watch France solve it first because they're not the worst offender.
The billionaires are irrelevant. You could take every penny they have and it wouldn't make a difference
They won't do that because all the government employees love their government jobs and they also can't admit that importing millions of foreigners that hate French culture isn't working.
Which EU members feel that regarding a ""mini wartime" economy"? Where can I see that evidenced?
Maybe. I am sceptical as I don't see that in their political actions. What realistic and practical solution do they actually offer towards that end, except for saying war will not end until they accept our demand (a stand quite similar to Russia)? (That strategy would be appropriate if, with their support, Ukraine could actually reclaim its lost territories - i.e. a military solution was viable. But it is clear that without NATO troops in the battlefield, this is highly unlikely.).
As for the claim of "mini wartime" economy, everyone was worried about the state of EU's economy when the war started and as it progressed, demands for declaring a wartime economy became very public. Some examples:
2022: Ukraine economic shock - https://www.eib.org/en/stories/ukraine-trade-inflation
2022: OECD report on impact of Russian war - https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/russia-s-war-of-aggression-aga...
2023: Does Europe need to declare a 'wartime economy'? - https://www.dw.com/en/does-europe-need-to-declare-a-wartime-...
2025: 'War economy:' Is the European 'peace project' at risk? - https://www.dw.com/en/what-is-a-war-economy/a-71996625
2025: Europe Rearms: What Defense Spending Means for Markets - https://rpc.cfainstitute.org/blogs/enterprising-investor/202...
2026: Europe's war economy - https://etedge-insights.com/featured-insights/geopolitics-an...
2026: The Irish Government is helping to usher in a new wartime economy in Europe - https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/08/29/irish-minister...
My big fear about left wing politicians is well intentioned stupidity.
Mamdani had the same problem but was luckily able to negotiate practicable payment plans on NYC's debt.
Also I believe it's much easier to solve well intentioned stupidity than to solve malice.
Unfortunately, political tribalism is rife online, and it is as bad here as anywhere else.
Meanwhile the right wing opposition keeps pointing fingers and telling that it's the left's (or center's, whatever) fault. Happened multiple times.
They both often continue increasing deficits and spending until they can't.
> Mamdani had the same problem but was luckily able to negotiate practicable payment plans on NYC's debt.
The last right-wing mayor was Bloomberg (I don't know how right-wing Bloomberg really is when he tried running as a Democrat), and that was 13 years ago.
> Also I believe it's much easier to solve well intentioned stupidity than to solve malice.
Well-intentioned stupidity can go on for far longer because people won't want to intervene because of a negative perception when intervening. If there is malice, there isn't a negative perception when intervening.
Also, left-wing governments are generally as corrupted and freedom-infringing as right-wing governments, at least in Europe.
My big fear about politicians is corruption, authoritarian tendencies and stupidity
There, done, put a pin in it. There's corrupt politicos on all sides of the spectrum, there's authoritarians on all sides and stupidity seems to be endemic.
I find it astounding that people can apply different rules to one group of politicians because they say things they like. I hold them all to the same standard; I assume they are all lying and corrupt until proven otherwise.
The stuff they want to get done might suck though.
They are complete imbeciles on many other issues.
When you put that together it's obvious. Being a bad person leads to getting rich and having strong conservative views, and if you have both you become a right wing politician easily.
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.
How can I see an English translation?