France's €0.055-per-GB internet tax dies five days after passing

How a €0.055-per-gigabyte tax passed and then vanished

The amendment, tabled by Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit, would have required content providers to pay €0.055 (about $0.06) for every gigabyte delivered to customers of French internet providers.

It cleared the National Assembly at the opening of the 9 am sitting on Friday, October 30, with just 35 of the chamber's 577 deputies taking part: 11 for, 10 against and 14 abstentions, according to the official session transcript. Both the government and Philippe Juvin, general rapporteur of the finance committee, opposed it.

The authors said it would raise around €10 billion ($11.2 billion) a year. The mechanics were spelled out in the amendment itself: internet providers, and 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 IANA registration number, and no record of what the data contained or where it went could be demanded.

Then the budget caught up with it. The solemn vote on the revenue section was due on Tuesday, November 3, but slipped because 758 amendments were still unexamined at midnight on Monday. It came on Wednesday evening instead, and the section was rejected 458 to 0. Every amendment adopted during three weeks of debate fell with it, including the per-gigabyte levy.

What now goes to the Senate is the government's original bill, which never contained the tax. To reappear, it 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 critics were not only the platforms

The loudest objections came from French tech companies that would have had to pay, not from the American giants the levy targeted.

VideoLAN, the nonprofit behind VLC, warned the levy would cost it more than €1 million a year, according to MacGeneration, though Lhardit replied that the caps would protect it. Xavier Niel, founder of national ISP Free, dismissed the deputies on X as "ignorant incompetents."

OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba 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 lukewarm. 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 worried about the technical and administrative load of a scheme whose revenue would go to the treasury rather than to networks. It would rather see commercial negotiations with the platforms.

Why Brussels and Washington made the tax hard to keep

Beyond the French chamber, the per-gigabyte idea runs against the direction of travel in both Brussels and Washington.

The European Commission spent years fielding telecom operators' demands that Big Tech chip in for network upgrades, the so-called "fair share" fight. In January, its 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.

The idea is not dead, just parked

The Socialists put a €0.10-per-gigabyte version in the program they presented this summer, ahead of next year's presidential election.

That is twice the rate that just failed. 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 return in other forms in the near future — and the next French government will have to decide whether to try again.

What it means for you

If you live in France, nothing changes: your internet bill and streaming subscriptions are unaffected, because the levy never reached the stage where it would have been collected. For readers in the US, UK and EU, the collapse is a signal that per-gigabyte levies on content providers remain politically toxic — Brussels has opted for voluntary cooperation instead of mandatory fees, and Washington has threatened tariffs on countries that adopt digital services taxes.

The proposal could still return in France or another EU country, but for now the only per-gigabyte tax on the table is the Socialists' €0.10 version, which is a campaign promise rather than law.

For five days, France had a per-gigabyte internet tax. Then it had a 458-0 vote and a budget bill without it. The episode says less about the merits of charging Netflix for data than about how fragile a three-week-old amendment is when the budget it rides on collapses.