France is getting download tax for content providers (€0.055/GB) | Hacker News Reader

France is getting download tax for content providers (€0.055/GB)

resetera.com

116 pointsbko93 comments

It's in incredible how hostile this tax is but I have to give them credit. They just see something that's productive and valuable and they just see money they can extort from people.

No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology. Or tax on stock buybacks which have questionable value in society. Or carbon tax.

Just see something people do and tax it.

On the subject of gasoline taxes, they are getting increasingly worried about lost revenue from the uptake of electric cars. It is going to be a distance tax I am sure, but what would make sense is to just give the department of transportation the electric tax already existing.

Pennsylvania is already $250/y regardless of usage.l and they already raised the price from the initial fee.

most states do that already, although many are looking at distance-based odometer readings instead (Washington state).

Already coming in in the UK next year. There are all sorts of issues with the approach:

- how does the tax authority know how many miles a car has driven each year? New cars in the UK are exempt from having standard safety testing at garages where mileage is recorded

- how are miles driven outside the UK accounted for? The tax is supposed to replace lost fuel duty, but if someone takes their electric car abroad, they still owe the British government money under the current arrangement

— do drivers pay in advance or arrears? If in advance, how do the government handle people grossly underestimating expected mileage to avoid paying ahead of time?

In short, it’s a mess.

Neoliberalism 101.. monetize and privatize everything and punish the poor disproportionately. Not for a beneficial purpose, but because "free is communism".

... except ... if there is anything the French government is not it's neoliberalist (yes, the president is, but he has long since lost the ability to change the budget)

> No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology

What? There is no justification for gasoline tax beyond "government wants more money" (and has now lent against the income stream and so cannot realistically lower the gasoline tax). Gasoline tax in France goes into the general budget and so there are 3 main things being paid from that: pensions, "health care" (and by that we mean paying sick people to not have to work, not expensive cancer treatments), state personnel expenditures (the biggest of which is education)

Road maintenance is paid partially by tolls, and the rest is not a big part of the budget. Another decent chunk of road maintenance is forced onto homeowners directly. The rest is not a huge part of the budget (which you can tell by the quality of roads in many French cities). Green policy is almost exclusively subsidies and is a very tiny part of spending.

You should check what people say, especially politicians. And reality is that despite endless rhetoric to the opposite, the "green revolution" is something that is happening to the EU, not something governments are meaningfully contributing to. Unless you count extra taxes and fuckups like the German (and French, and Belgian, and even a little bit Swiss) nuclear fiasco. Extra taxes are also being imposed on the green transition by the way (probably like in Australia: because they make especially homeowners less dependent on centralized services and thus harder to tax).

Financial nuclear fiascos are happening all around except to the media it's like there's a huge explosion in a park, and 3 progressively smaller explosions in the same city. In the newspaper you'll find details on how the bigger explosion affected the cat of the major's niece, but you won't find much at all on the smaller explosions. But all the nuclear fiascos have the same "general shape": political decisions, made for electoral reasons, were disastrous financial decisions for energy policy. But nobody cared ...

Not simply EUR 5.5 cents per GB! The tax is limited to 15% of revenue from data transmission in France, or 2% of total global revenues.

So Netflix pays max 15% of streaming revenue in France. If you and I start a streaming service only in France, we pay a max 2% of streaming revenue in France (because that's the only place where we stream). So there's potentially a protectionist element. But note that you and I could do our France-only service from anywhere and still be capped at 2%, according to the law as I understand it (not a lawyer).

> « La taxe sur les producteurs de données numériques fait l’objet d’un plafonnement correspondant au maximum à 15 % du chiffre d’affaires réalisé en France par l’émetteur ou à 2 % de son chiffre d’affaires total. [1]

"The tax on digital service producers has a ceiling that corresponds to a maximum of 15% of France-based revenue by the transmitter or 2% of its total revenue (my translation)."

[1] https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...

What's to stop Netflix from spinning out a Netflix France for the sole purpose of having all French revenue in a single corporate entity subject to the 2% of total global revenues rule?

A consultant at McKinsey is drafting the slides pitching this as we speak

Being forced to pay real taxes in France maybe?

Netflix France would be able to pay nearly whatever content licensing and technical access fees it wants to Netflix. It's can make approximately zero profit and need not have any French employees, merely be a container for having a total top-line revenue equal to Netflix's revenues from France.

I wonder if this got solved anywhere yet: how do you get politicians that actually want to save money instead of raising taxes or creating new types of taxes?

I understand that it’s way easier and quicker to do the latter instead of saving.

That’s the reason they do it in the first place.

I just wonder if there is a way to incentivize them to save instead. Maybe some country was successful at one point in time.

>I wonder if this got solved anywhere yet: how do you get politicians that actually want to save money instead of raising taxes or creating new types of taxes?

???

"I'll lower/won't raise your taxes" is politics 101. The bigger issue is how you prevent politicians from promising goodies and/or lower taxes, funding them both by borrowing.

Sure they promise.

I am talking about what they actually do after they got elected.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/th...

In France they don't exist.

Warren Buffett, I believe, suggested passing a law making every sitting member of Congress ineligible for reelection whenever the federal deficit exceeds 3%

I suspect he suggested 3% because of the yearly GDP growth at the time, but I say make it 0%. Politicians shouldn't have the authority of indebting future generations.

Then you might be incentivized to deliberately go into debt strategically, and remove the sitting opposition if you think you'll lose the next election.

My state (Indiana) has a constitutional clause that prohibits borrowing except in the case of an unexpected shortfall in revenue or war. This means the state may not pass a deficit budget except in time of war. It had worked out well for the state.

Do you mean a war as formally declared by Congress, or perpetual wars that occur regardless?

> Population (2025)

> • Total

> 6,973,333[3]

Works for Indiana, good. But I doubt it scales.

I believe most states have a balanced budget requirement and can’t borrow money for their operations, like the federal government can. CA, for example, has a rainy day fund that they use to even out the revenue fluctuations.

src: https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/state-and-local-ta...

That’s how you get rotting infrastructure and a bad education system.

That’s also indebting future generations, it just doesn’t show in the deficit.

Not to mention without state‘s debt a lot of people lose interest rates on their savings.

Putting deficits below GDP growth can also be a roundabout way of slightly impoverishing future generations. A country that engages in countercyclical spending and growth via (less-than-GDP) deficits outperforms one that runs zero debt, and future generations end up wealthier.

What if people become increasingly dependent on their government’s spending beyond its means - so that they suffer more harm once the deficit is reduced than had it never been raised in the first place - making it impossible to rein in the deficit when borrowing costs rise and the debt is high?

> how do you get politicians that actually want to save money

What makes you think that they don't save money? looking at the state of public services and infrastructures (at least in my country), I can see how we don't spend as much as we should, which I suppose qualifies as saving. Budgets for education, justice, police, healthcare often decrease too. Also seeing how many billionaires we have, it's also obvious to me that we actually need more tax, not less.

Somehow I'm paying more tax and getting worse services. I'm getting pretty sick of it, and the only way it's going to change is a reform of the public service.

I'd want to see quarterly budgets and funding vs yearly, penalties for any department executives that spend just so they use their entire budgets, and efficiency dividends implemented for any department that has been caught spending on pointless crap. We have the tech to move fast in ensuring funds are being used responsibly.

> Somehow I'm paying more tax

You're not rich enough: "The effective tax rate of U.S. billionaires (measured by the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers) fell from 30% in 2010–2017 to 23.8% (or roughly 24%) in 2018–2020"

https://www.nber.org/papers/w34170

Yes but you're not going to like the solution.

Basically make a pledge to never raise taxes. It was called norquist pledge. Signers promise to oppose any and all efforts to increase marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses.

Questionable whether this actually constrained spending. Ideally would be paired w balance budget amendment

The problem is they tax and save upon the wrong people which leads to wealthy transfer to the upper 1% which leads to economic problems. They try to fix that by taxing and saving upon the wrong people even more.

It’s almost as if this is now done on purpose.

Under Clinton the "PAYGO" rules enforced that all spending had to be covered by cuts or new taxes. This caused a lot of aggressive review and limited eagerness to spend.

> Maybe some country was successful at one point in time.

It worked for France after the invention of the guillotine.

The easiest place to save is in entitlements. Saving there is unfortunately a really good way to avoid reelection. If you want to save money, get a better demography. That's impossible, but not more impossible than cutting benefits.

We could return to a sound money system, which is what the US had before 1914. (The Federal Reserve Act in 1914 switched us to a fiat money system.)

I shared this mental model until I read "The Almighty Dollar" by Brendan Greeley. Highly recommend! It shows how we moved through a few different monetary regimes in the 19th century, including regional variations and private banknotes. Spanish silver dollars were also widely circulated until 1857. The greenback wasn't introduced until the Civil War. Reliable convertibility of federal notes to gold was the exception, not the rule, available c. 1879-1933.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634502/the-almighty...

We also went through fiat money in the Confederacy, with the usual result - massive inflation.

Maybe also prohibit legislation that protects excess/longterm promises too? Promises are cheap enforcement of promises cost money too.

You need to start by making taxes mostly optional, at the discretion of the payer, with the payers having power to choose its spending.

Personally i'm in the camp of:

1 - A minor poll tax on all citizens for basic sovereignty

2 - Local vote based taxes for local things: - Want a hospital? Roads? Any local infrastructure or collective service? A private entity makes an offer to build/manage a hospital for a 20 year period at a X amount per year. Anyone is able to vote for it by choosing which amount they want to contribute then and there or with the ability to impose a lien on their land to secure ongoing yearly payments for a period of time. Have the vote happen and if enough people offer to pay for it, it gets done. If there are more people willing to pay everyone gets a pro-rata discount

It's not actually about reducing spending vs increasing taxes, it's about regressive tax policies vs progressive tax policies. Inequalities are rising, because progressive forms of taxation (wealth tax...) are being removed in favor of regressive ones (such as this ridiculous internet tax), while the redistributive apparatus (social security, benefits...) shrinks year after year. The reason is simple: the rich basically own the government, evidenced by the fact that they are the only winners of the past decades.

We've been doing austerity and tax cuts for the rich for 50 years now, under neoliberalism. We have to stop and focus our attention on reducing the wealth inequality that are destroying our nations, before it's too late.

Maybe this would at least have the silver lining of forcing website operators to not ship 100MB of bloated javascript mess and auto playing video

I think it will just cause France to be siloed. Imagine what a child downloads in 5-6 hours a day of mindless garbage, now that is a €20/month habit why would YouTube or TikTok want them anymore. Bingers on streaming services are also putting the providers in an awkward position. In the linked article VLC estimates this will cost them €1m/year so they won't be viable. Steam is on the hook for €3.25m/week that is the equivalent of them losing €11m/week in sales so even they will be lucky to still be profitable in France.

This was a proposal, and it was rejected. Not an actual tax or law.

Refused a while ago, voted into the 2027 budget (which itself isn't set in stone yet) yesterday: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...

This is what all the recent articles are about. It passed 11 against 10 out of 577 potential votes. The chances this makes it into the actual budget are quite slim and it would be insane if it happened.

The fact that this was proposed and voted on is ridiculous enough. In this day and age we need _some_ politicians with basic technical knowledge to help guide society in the right direction.

This just points out how incredibly incompetent everyone involved is about technical matters (I will refrain from making comments about their competency in other fields but I'm afraid that this is not a great sign).

The minutes[1] show there were only 35 voters making those 21 votes. I know it's only a budget amendment, but that's an exceptionally low headcount to be a quorum for anything.

1: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/comptes-rendus/sea...

the classic trope of a bill so atrocious but delivers news headlines of the kind... "Oh, it didn't get the votes" "Oh mercy, it passed stage 1" "Oh crude, its here!"

Came here to say this. The forum post is factually incorrect, it would be good to add a note.

With the state of French politics lately, it's very unlikely any budget will be passed any time soon. My take is the proposal is a stunt aimed at generating some attention.

Right, this should be flagged. It's blatant misinformation and rage bait. How is a random post on a random message board even considered a valid source. OP here should take the advice of the mod on the board they linked to, where the thread was locked:

>it's a good idea to just not post things we don't understand. Let's not be so in a rush to break news that it becomes misinformation.

If the US were to follow this excellent idea to raise revenue, it could completely solve the federal budget deficit.

A modest download tax of USD $2.07 per GB suffices.

Estimate:

  - 134 million households
  - approx 80% of households subscribe to home broadband
  - approx 750 GB download per month per household
  - $2 trillion annual deficit
  - assumes no change in household behaviour in response to the new tax

instead of taxing some people to cover bad behaviour of others, may be should just allow musk doge?

>assumes no change in household behaviour in response to the new tax

Lol, my behavior would change a lot if I was paying $2 per gig, my god

I used to pay $5 a gig for mobile data, I used about 100MB per month. Now I have unlimited and I use >5GB

This is not a definitive vote, there is few reason to think it will be adopted in the final budget law as the government and Senate will be probably against this amendment. Additionally it's expected the budget law will be globally rejected by assembly itself as there is no clear majority at the moment.

France is in pretty bad financial shape, so they are going to be looking at getting money wherever they can.

The stated reason is that physical business, when they use the country's infrastructure pay tax to contribute to the upkeep. But presumably, internet businesses, especially those based outside the country use the infrastructure but do not pay for the upkeep. This tax is supposed to address this issue.

While the solution might not be optimal, how valid is the underlying problem? Can someone make genuine steelman arguments?

AFAIK the Internet in France is private infrastructure that has already been paid for by its customers.

How to get rioting people off the streets and into their homes watching Netflix ...

Let's see ...

Content tax?

The dreaded cloud egress tax, except now it's actually a tax.

Some amount would be ok IMO, besides the users' connections there's a lot of national infrastructure used like the internet exchanges.

Something like a digital road tax isn't a super bad idea. But the amount should be a magnitude or two smaller. And there should be exceptions for free content.

11 votes to 10… there was basically no one to vote for.

Stop wasting your time on that, it’s going to get removed next time.

Wow. That's more than the cost of the storage space you'd be downloading onto.

Not if you are using enterprise ssds... but this is some insane profit seeking. I think they should just ask for service providers to pay a share of the local revenues that would be easier to digest than this insanity.

I feel like torrenting is tax evasion now as well in France.

I would riot too.

I actually like the idea of this, but with some restrictions (and wouldn't mind seeing it in the US). Yes, I know the costs are passed thru to consumers.

Here's my thinking:

1. Limit who is charged based on how much bandwidth they consume / month. If it's over 1TB, the tax goes into affect. This helps small businesses.

2. If (1) can't work, we can do it based on income from French users above X / month.

3. Tax income must go towards infrastructure projects: Parks & Recs, Fiber buildouts, etc.

Who had this idea? This would have the effect that paid services get more expensive and free services get lower quality, stop working, or become illegal.

Putting that aside, I'd be interested in how they'd want to measure this when in practice network traffic is delivered over all kinds of CDNs and rented servers from who knows where. The technicalities of determining who would have to pay seem very non-trivial to me.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50308240

Europe never beating the allegations...

This will severely undermine technological innovation and the development of new technologies.

I tried playing the monster mash on YouTube tonight. It played two ads then started the song but the video had a weird ai avatar performing. It played for five seconds then started playing another ad.

I'm just bitching....

I don’t even use ad Block to watch the videos anymore. I simply have a frontier AI download the video to a jellyfin server first for me.

Compression is tax evasion!

Avoidance, not evasion.

Avoision*

That's not it, it's tax optimization, it's sibling with friends in a political parties. Easy to confuse them, looking almost the same, but it's in fact two separate concepts!

Haha, making better compression algorithms is a detriment to society, I love it. Finally. Getting those bastard HEVC devs behind bars is a lifelong dream of mine.

Maybe it should be argued that it’s a net tax. You download the video to watch it and then you re-upload it so the tax is zero.

Just like if you buy something from the store and then return it you get all of your money back even if you actually used the item.

Can't wait to only be able to stream 240p

GTA6 will have a special 8-bit pixel art edition for France.

This tax is not well thought but we need to tax those companies that evade taxes. Let's be creative and strong.

Evading taxes is criminal in most places I can’t imagine France allows it

It is fully legal, as in most places, because we are talking about exploiting legal loopholes

Still loopholes, but still the law and, as such, legal :)

Taxation is theft. You're morally obligated to evade taxation.

Not eating boogers is murder.

I can post wild nonsense without any backing, too!

This is going to well with the digital only ps5

What an obtuse way to tax these services.

Reeks of desperation from a group of bureaucrats who are capable of nothing but taxing people

Are you familiar with their debt situation?

Clearly the result of not enough taxes, obviously soon they will have taxed themselves to prosperity.

Yes I am, and I doubt this taxation will make a dent, it will just stifle innovation

> group of bureaucrats who are capable of nothing but taxing people

Welcome to EU!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com