- French deputies voted 11 to 10 to tax content providers €0.055 for every gigabyte sent to French internet subscribers
- Backers claim €10 billion a year in taxes, but the government disputes both the figure and whether traffic can be measured fairly
- Five days later, the Assembly rejected the budget's whole revenue section 458 to 0, wiping out the tax with it
France's lower house had voted to charge content companies for every gigabyte they deliver to French internet users - but the measure lasted only five days before it was shot down unanimously.
Deputies rejected the revenue half of the 2027 budget by a vote of 458 to 0, LCP reported.
Every amendment adopted during three weeks of debate fell with it, including the per-gigabyte levy; this means that what now goes to the Senate is the government's original bill, which never contained it to begin with.
How a gigabyte would have become a tax bill
The amendment, tabled by Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit, would have required content providers to pay €0.055 (roughly $0.06) per gigabyte delivered to customers of French internet providers.
It passed at the opening of the 9 am sitting on Friday, October 30, with just 35 of the National Assembly's 577 deputies taking part: 11 voted for, 10 against and 14 abstained, according to the official session transcript. Both the government and the finance committee's general rapporteur, Philippe Juvin, opposed it. Its authors said it would raise around €10 billion ($11.2 billion) a year.
The mechanics are spelled out in the amendment itself: Internet providers, along with any company selling internet access to households or businesses, would count the data flowing to their customers and attribute it to whoever sent it, under the supervision of telecoms regulator Arcep and France's tax authority.
Senders would be identified by company name and their Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) registration number, and no record of what the data contained or where it went could be demanded.
The move has not only found obvious opposition within French politicians after its surprise initial approval in a nearly empty chamber, but has found surprisingly vocal critics at home: VideoLAN, the nonprofit behind VLC, warned the levy would cost it more than €1 million a year, MacGeneration reports, though Lhardit replied that the caps would protect it. The founder of a national ISP, Free, Xavier Niel, dismissed the deputies on X as "ignorant incompetents."
OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba, whose company raised some server prices by up to 87% this autumn over memory costs, calculated that on a 100Gbit/s transit port costing around €6,300 a month, the tax on his assumed traffic would reach €1.02 million a month. He put OVHcloud's exposure at €23 million to €70 million a year.
Even the operators who would have done the counting were unenthusiastic. The French Telecoms Federation, which represents Orange, Bouygues Telecom and SFR, does not reject the idea that big platforms should contribute more to networks, according to Freenews, but it is worried about the technical and administrative load of a scheme whose revenue would go to the treasury rather than to networks, and would rather see commercial negotiations with the platforms.
The solemn vote on the revenue section was due on Tuesday, November 3, but it slipped because 758 amendments were still unexamined at midnight on Monday, NosParlementaires noted. It came on Wednesday evening instead, and no group voted for the amended text, essentially killing the entire proposal in its tracks before the French Senate got involved.
To reappear, the tax would need a senator to refile it and a chamber controlled by the center-right Les Républicains to back it, which Next considered unlikely.
The idea itself is not going away: The Socialists put a €0.10-per-gigabyte version in the program they presented this summer, ahead of next year's presidential election. There is, however, international pressure and considerations that would ensure this never actually happens, even as countries vie to attract the most AI infrastructure investments, and this could be the biggest dealbreaker for multiple players.
Beyond France, it runs against the tide. Brussels spent years fielding telecom operators' demands that Big Tech chip in for network upgrades, the so-called "fair share" fight, and in January the European Commission's Digital Networks Act proposed only a voluntary cooperation mechanism rather than mandatory network fees.
Then there is Washington: Donald Trump has long threatened tariffs on countries that tax US tech firms, and in June 2026 he warned of 100% tariffs on any country implementing a digital services tax on American companies. A per-gigabyte levy whose biggest payers would be Google, Meta, Amazon, and Netflix would be hard to present as anything other than that.
For now, the proposal stands killed; nothing has changed on anyone's phone or internet bill, and, seemingly, for the 2027 budget at least, nothing will. But the idea could show up in other forms in the near future.
