French lawmakers approved a tax of €0.055 for every gigabyte of internet traffic
assemblee-nationale.fr
assemblee-nationale.fr
Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Just old people being old people.
I live in Hungary where this is common but it's more like a "you pay tax for storage which goes to the labels, in turn we don't prosecute piracy" https://www.artisjus.hu/english/copyright-in-hungary/
Mind you we have a hungarian private torrent tracker with 400k users and 2.7 petabyte of data running since 2005. Virtually everyone is using it in the country but no one really wants to shut it down because at this point it's also a cultural archive.
Prosecuting “piracy” is sold in as a free trade deal requirement with the US
Yes, France is in the EU. However, the actions of France do not equate to the actions of the EU.
Despite what pro-Brexit type people will tell you, there is a lot of sovereignty in local laws within the EU. And the ability to set your own taxes is one of them.
Btw, the EU is a tech powerhouse, you just don't know that. ASML, Zeiss, TRUMPF, etc. have full monopoly on eUV lithography and majority of the market on any other nodes. Just one example.
Airbus leads with about 55%–60% of the active narrow and wide-body commercial aircraft market. Airbus has much better track record and doesn't collide with FAA and doesn't "skimp" on development and QA (I'm looking at you MCAS!).
The culture is right there, we are taking our sweet time.
ASML is an important company but it is mostly just an integrator of technology from many different countries.
Any references? As far as I know, ASML is as Dutch as it gets.
> ASML is an important company but it is mostly just an integrator of technology from many different countries
yes and no, outside of Cymer, wholly owned subsidiary of ASML, it's mostly European countries:
Core Technology & Mechatronics:
• Netherlands: Houses VDL Groep, Neways Electronics, and Prodrive Technologies
• Germany: ZEISS (precision optics, lenses, and mirrors) and TRUMPF (high-powered CO₂ lasers)
• Belgium
Dunno where your US government department of energy claim comes from...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUV_lithography
Basically, US DoE invented the core tech and formed a consortium called EUV LLC to further develop the technology. ASML came along much later to acquire SVG in order to gain commercial access to the technology and research. The Dutch company "ASML" didn't actually invent most of it. They are just the integrator.
This is how ASML even describes itself:
> Board member Wayne Allan in 2023: “We're an integrator – we build some of the modules in our machines, but we procure a huge amount of materials and critical components from suppliers, nearly 80% of the components.”
Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
You could say the same about lots of software. You didn't write the programming language, same for libraries and so forth...
ASML has its headquarters in Veldhoven, Netherlands, around 60% of workforce is based around that area. It's a spin-off from Philips, another iconic Dutch electronics company.
How is it not Dutch?
In America it comes largely from California, New York, and Connecticut, as well as Germany, Japan, and elsewhere.
If you are trying to say EUV is not Dutch, I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that.
Second of all, EUV isn't everything. There is a lot of "legacy" node demand.
> Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
"Some" of the American. It's funny how you name it first despite it's being the minority.
> As of 2025, ASML is the only company that produces and sells EUV systems for chip production.
This is pretty much everything we need to know.
But I especially think your last point about old people is really both false and irrelevant. If I wanted to troll, I could say it's really dumb, just americans being americans.
Yes, but... isn't their assumption mostly correct? Spotify and Co have changed the equation in the sense that one doesn't have files anymore but when those laws came out they targeted MP3 players and DVDs who were, indeed, full of pirated media.
I don't like the result for other reasons, but the assumption seemed always relatively accurate.
The motivation is even more stupid than that, it is to compensate authors for "lost" income due to buyers making private copies of their media, which is thankfully legal. For example, if I accidentally scratch a CD and it doesn't play anymore, I won't buy a new one if I had made a backup.
Counterpoint: I am behind the gfw.. and seriously dont understand how anyone can get anything done… but it still seems to work… i pay like 2 euros for 500MBit fiber
Judging by the comments here, every single French person runs a CDN at home? What am I missing, or are people completely misunderstanding what this tax is targeting?
There are people who consider this a good thing. I don’t have a strong opinion on it, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.
Because its not a problem for Big-corp, but Opensource-Projects/Tor-Nodes, for example i would have to pay ~10$ a day just for my Tor-Relay. It's deeply Anti-Democratic and the opposite what the Internet should be.
The objective seems to be to target fournisseurs de contenu (content providers), and the mentioned collection mechanism identifies a entreprise émettrice (sending company). Also, they talk about "turnover" mattering as well, so if you don't charger people, another reason this might not affect you at all. If neither of those apply, like you hosting a website for a FOSS project, it's unlikely you'd have to pay this tax.
But, this is based on reading the session notes themselves, not news article. I'm happy to be corrected if I misunderstood anything.
What french public conveniently fails to grasp and loses 100% of my support is the naive expectation that in struggling economy they should be rich, while having social system actually dialed to 12 since that 11 is never enough for them. And have 0 doubt, all the protesters now and also before are at the end after money. Money will magically appear in government budget and in all salaries, prices of petrol/diesel will be magically ultra low regardless of yet another failed war being waged by US causing massive rise in prices globally. If one doesn't travel around the world and just lives there it may feel like a normal default system, but given reality of the world out there its anything but.
Lets talk like adults what is achievable or not and manage expectations accordingly. Not very french way, is it. Any attempt to reform even a bit is met with extreme violence, blocking of economy and other self-harm behavior that ruins the economy further and solves 0 of underlying issues, so most cave in and problems fester. I predict it will get much worse in France before there is chance to get things better again, and how much depends on their ultra comfy, some would even say spoiled population.
It's not obvious that housing "tech powerhouses" is a good thing. I mean look at the US, and how much problems all these companies bring to society. I'm also not sure we'd want anything like that in Europe or EU, if we also need to accept the same consequences as the US did.
American billionaires are self-made (70% became billionaires during their life) where in Europe 70% inherited it. The powerhouse companies of the European economy are stagnant and the families which held them 100 years ago have a great chance of still holding them.
Are tech billionaires obnoxious? Yes, undoubtedly. I'd take them in a heartbeat over having a more permanent aristocracy.
Given the class inequality differences between the two places, and how one seems to basically be "survival of the fittest, if "the fittest" is ~1K people", arguably "tech billionaires" seems way worse than "a dying aristocracy", but maybe I'm too socialist to understand properly.
The median income of a French household puts it in Alabama (Alabama is wealthier). If you truly believe that the US is a capitalist hellscape where only the fittest survive, Americans are more than fit enough. It's not even like rent is affordable in Europe; young people feel the same squeeze but with far less opportunity.
Europe regulates itself out of the competition. If you're OK with living in a stagnating economy while youth unemployment stays above 15%, sure - but let's be clear that you've still got billionaires and unlike in the US they actually succeed in using the government to protect their monopolies.
Europe is great to live in if you have a home and a job. It's much, much worse if you're an ambitious young person looking to make a mark on the world, and reducing that to "salary is everything" is imo very sad.
The US is a failing democracy ruled by ruthless liars and capitalists. China's surveillance and lack of freedom is beyond discussion. So EU not being a tech powerhouse still does not look too bad.
You shouldn't. Nor should you conclude anything general about the EU from something French politicans do. It's disingenuous.
Tax their bloody real estate into poverty because that's the only message they'll understand.
But all usual troll that like to trash talk on Europe at every occasion will be there to add their comment.
Now, you know that bad ideas have an immortality all their own.
This sort of thinking may take on new life in the context of the overall European economic situation => https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2026/10/29/europea...
It'd be embarrassing if they'd actually make this as-is into law, which for obvious reasons wouldn't happen right now, but that hasn't happened yet.
Just like it's not embarrassing for a software developer to write code that has bugs, this happens even to the best of us. What would be embarrassing, would be to have that code deployed as-is to production, with bugs, that's the part we should be vigilant about.
It's also disappointing to see how many users here, people who you'd expect to at least have a mild familiarity with the internet and how it works, don't read the article, comments, or sometimes even the entire OP. They see a title that supports their biases, make wild assumptions, and immediately move to spitting vitriol into the comments.
What a horrible idea. This is like creating a special tax on start up capital. It goes against so many fundamentals, such as increasing efficiency, productivity, automation, carbon. It's just crazy.
Fortunately, I do not live in France.
Otherwise, this tax would cost me at least 50% of what I pay for all my food, daily.
50 GB of daily traffic is normal for me, sometimes even much more, e.g. one day ago I had a traffic of 1 TB per day, because I downloaded the Mistral Large LLM weights. So to download Mistral, I would have had to pay EUR 55, much more than I pay for a month of Internet access.
I also don't live in France and think it's dumb but I think we need better information than the topic line to have real discussion of it.
It passed 11 to 10 and has to still pass in the French senate's version of their finance bill and the French government is against it. [2]
[1] https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
[2] https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1750726/article/2026-10-30/l-ass...
That would make Netflix like 30-50% more expensive.
What on earth is going on in this comment section? Seems like it's 99% of Americans who obviously didn't read the session notes themselves, or even any background information in English, before commenting on this with their least charitable reading. I don't get it, why?
If you don't understand the thing, probably because you haven't spent even 2 minutes looking up information about it, why comment about some scenario you don't even know if it applies or not? Like what's the point, just to spread FUD for the fun of it?
It seems... fine.
But legislators are slow and companies are smart, so likely what would happen is something like: 1. Tax goes in place. 2. YouTube decreases the quality and starts broadcasting in 640x480 VGA. 3. France gets pissed. Forces them to 'distribute content at world standards with a law' 4. YouTube challenges the law in court. 5. The case costs the French more than the revenue provided in the meanwhile.
Or YouTube leaves France.
Who is winning here?
1) How it changes behaviour (taxing something usually means less of that thing is produced, and sometimes you want less of something e.g. smoking as a classic example)
2) How much revenue it raises for the treasury after taking into account 1
I cannot help but think that on both counts this is really bad.
This seems like an absurdly high rate of taxation on a resource that if anything we want to increase the volume of. Creating disincentives for high speed/bandwidth connections and services surely means less economic activity net, which means lower revenues and profits to tax across multiple industries. You are creating very direct disincentives on economic activity in a very blunt way. Its not like you are say taxing online gambling activity which is a net social drain on society, this is everything digital/tech.
I can understand that they want to maybe tax mainly foreign tech and media firms, but this seems like the worst way to go about it with a tax that would make up the bulk of the cost to serve.
You can solve your government's finances with this one weird trick!
That the current internet with social media and AI boom destroys democracies and the planet is a fact. Whether such tax is a good step to slow that down, I have not thought about.
more tax revenue from any source they can imagine. Instead of trying to cut out the welfare, and reign in spending, it's always easier to propose a tax that's small and widespread (so that each individual may not be incentivized to fight it).
[1] https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/05/30/france-germany-uk-number...
There are over 10,000 taxing jurisdictions in the US, so good luck with even trying to figure how many different taxes.
Is it even a clear problem to figure out which business pays what?
This tax should also be capped to a fraction of their benefits.
End users, tor relays, content providers outside fortune x00 are out of scope .
Interesting...
This will show companies not getting away with those GBs! Everyone should pay for extra, this will save republic for the next 100 years at least, increase it next year to 5€ at least
This is not final and may well be struck down later, either in new vote or by the Senate.
I know Netflix can raise prices for french people, but this could be also their goal to get other alternative a better chance to compete.
And it applies to free services too, which will recover the expense by increasing the ads
Don't Invest as a IT-Firm, if power is ~cheap but data expensive....well there are better places.
There is no chance this is going through. It's just posturing really. Posting this just wastes people time. A more accurate title would be "11 deputies vote for ... at a time when 35 people are in session and 21 bothered to vote".
I remember, in 2025 friends that were into business said something along the lines of France being socially and economically doomed. I didn't know this much wrong could happen all at once.
Just damn. Riots first. Now absurd laws.
Won't YouTube just restrict everyone to 480p unless paying?
This is such a dumb idea I feel shame in their place, or whatever the English expression for that is.
The situation is resulting in this terrible feedback loop of higher taxation, increased regulation, decreased productivity, and increased poverty. And then people turn to socialist politics which just continues to exacerbate the situation.
US billionaires pay taxes ? Sounds like the start of a a great joke, what's the punchline ?
Remind me, who are those groups of people moving to Florida, Texas or wherever else just so they can escape the California wealth tax which is only a one-time 5% ?
Oh yeah, that's right. The US billionaires who are apparently so diligently willing to pay their taxes.
Well, if they are residents of California, then they should "pay taxes regardless of residence", i.e. in California ?
Instead, decamping to Florida, Texas or wherever else seems to me very much paying quite a lot of regard to residence ?
And again, just because they move to a state with lower taxes doesn’t mean they don’t pay taxes. The highest earners in the US pay the vast majority of taxes. This is a fact you can easily look into yourself.