Findivoza

November 7, 2026

Findivoza

Business & Money

France votes 11–10 to tax the internet by the gigabyte

Faizan Altaf

Eleven French lawmakers, in a chamber built for 577, have voted to tax the internet by the gigabyte: €0.055, about six US cents, on every gigabyte of video, music and game downloads sent to a home in France, paid by the company sending the data, not the person watching. The sponsors say it would raise €10 billion a year from the world’s biggest tech platforms. The government, which opposed it, says half the money would come from smaller companies instead, including French ones. For now, nothing has changed: the vote was only an early step in the budget process, and the tax is not law.

The measure, amendment I-1358 to France’s 2027 finance bill, was adopted on Friday, 30 October 2026, by 11 votes to 10, with 14 abstentions. Only 35 deputies took part. It is the most literal attempt yet by a major country to tax the digital economy: not on profits, not on revenue, not on advertising, but on the sheer weight of the data itself.

At a glance

What happened: France’s National Assembly voted 11–10 on 30 October 2026 to add a €0.055-per-gigabyte tax on data sent by content providers to French internet users to the 2027 budget bill. Only 35 of the Assembly’s 577 deputies took part.

Why it matters: The tax would fall mainly on Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai, which carry about half of France’s internet traffic, but the government warns about €5 billion of the €10 billion would come from smaller providers.

What happens next: The amendment must survive the Assembly’s vote on the whole first part of the budget, scheduled for Tuesday, 3 November 2026, then pass the Senate.

The vote: 11 to 10, in a nearly empty chamber

The sitting opened at 9:00 on Friday, 30 October, with debate limited to one minute per speaker. The amendment had been filed on 9 October by Laurent Lhardit, a deputy of the Socialistes et apparentés group, with 67 co-signatories. A near-identical version had already been rejected by the Finance Committee on 9 October.

All 11 votes in favour came from left-wing groups: five Socialists, two from La France insoumise, two Ecologists and two from the Communist-led Gauche Démocrate et Républicaine group. The 10 votes against came from the governing coalition: four from Ensemble pour la République, five from the Droite Républicaine and one from Les Démocrates.

The result was decided by abstentions. Ten Rassemblement National deputies were present and abstained; had they voted against, the amendment would have failed by 11 votes to 20. The 35 deputies who took part represented about 6 per cent of the chamber.

How the tax would work

The amendment would create a new tax, the tax on digital data producers, adding four new articles to France’s General Tax Code. The rate is €0.055 for every gigabyte delivered to a customer of a French internet provider. The sender pays: streaming services, platforms, game stores and software makers. Where content travels through a delivery network such as Akamai or Cloudflare, the network’s total outflow is counted.

Internet providers would not pay. They would only measure the volumes and report them, using a consolidated, anonymised system supervised by Arcep and the tax authority, with figures reported quarterly. The text bars any record of what the data contains or who received it, with no deep packet inspection and no audit of individual subscribers’ data.

The cap is unclear. The tax would be limited to at most 15 per cent of a company’s turnover in France, or 2 per cent of its total turnover, and the text does not say which limit applies when they differ. There is no minimum size and no exemption, so a public broadcaster or a free non-profit app would be taxed like Netflix, and no start date is set.

Why the sponsors want it

The written justification frames the measure as a correction between two parts of the economy: the established economy of shops and factories, which pays for public services from a tax base physically located in France, and what the authors call a “deterritorialised economy” that sells to the same customers and uses the same infrastructure, but whose tax base is a self-declared profit whose location it chooses.

Their answer is to use data volume as a proxy for economic activity. A company can move its profits to another country, the argument goes, but it cannot move the physical delivery of a film or a game to a home in France. Lhardit told the chamber the tax would be mainly paid by the globalised digital giants, since they send the vast majority of the data that reaches French internet subscribers.

What it would cost: from a song to GTA 6

The rate sounds tiny, and for small things it is. Every figure below is the gross charge on the data, before the revenue caps apply, and a charge on the sender, not a bill for the user.

A three-minute song uses about 7.2 megabytes, which would carry a tax of €0.0004. A two-and-a-half-hour film in high definition uses about 7.5 gigabytes, or €0.41, and the same film in 4K uses about 17.5 gigabytes, or €0.96. A football match uses about 6 gigabytes in high definition, or €0.33, and about 14 gigabytes in 4K, or €0.77.

Games are the eye-openers. Minecraft, at about 4 gigabytes, would carry €0.22. EA Sports FC 26, at about 100 gigabytes, would carry €5.50. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, at about 161 gigabytes, would carry €8.86. And Grand Theft Auto 6, at a reported 210 gigabytes, would carry €11.55. A 20-gigabyte patch would add another €1.10. GTA 6 was due out on 19 November 2026, but the tax is not law and would not apply to its launch.

For a household, the figures are modest but not trivial. An illustrative home using 250 gigabytes a month would account for about €13.75 a month in gross tax, or about €165 a year, before caps.

Who would pay the most

The amendment’s authors name five companies as the main payers: Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai. Together, they account for about half of the data traffic measured by Arcep. Lhardit said 20 more foreign platforms would bring the total to 75–80 per cent.

Arcep’s 2026 barometer puts Akamai at 12.0 per cent of traffic, Netflix at 11.6, Amazon at 9.8, Google at 8.9 and Meta at 6.7 per cent, with everyone else at 46.2 per cent. At €0.055 a gigabyte, before caps, that would mean gross annual bills of about €1.32 billion for Akamai, €1.28 billion for Netflix, €1.08 billion for Amazon, €0.98 billion for Google and €0.74 billion for Meta. The remaining 46.2 per cent of traffic would account for about €5.08 billion, which is the core objection: nearly half the money would come from companies that are not the giants the measure targets.

The government’s objections

The government opposed the amendment, and so did Philippe Juvin, the general rapporteur of the finance committee. David Amiel, the minister for public action and accounts, objected on three grounds. First, the technical one: it would require flow sensors, or measuring flows at individual receiving terminals. Second, who would really pay: Amiel said half of the tax, still €5 billion on the sponsors’ figures, would fall not on the large digital companies but on smaller content providers, notably French ones. Third, other instruments already exist, including France’s digital services tax of 3 per cent.

Juvin warned the biggest platforms could pass the tax on to advertisers. Lhardit answered the argument about consumers, not advertisers. “The rapporteur keeps objecting that the taxes will be passed on to consumers. Yet I fail to see how a tax could be passed on to users of Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, since these services are free,” he said. The reply did not address Juvin’s actual point. All three are funded mainly by advertising, and the platforms have passed digital taxes to advertisers before: Google charges advertisers a 2 per cent regulatory surcharge in France, rising to 3 per cent on 1 January 2027.

The small companies caught in the net

The most quoted objection since the vote has come from VideoLAN, the French non-profit behind the VLC media player, used worldwide. VideoLAN said on 30 October that the tax would cost it more than €1 million a year, even though it is not one of the global platforms the measure targets. At €0.055 a gigabyte, that implies about 18 million gigabytes of downloads to French users each year, all of it free software that earns VideoLAN nothing.

OVHcloud, France’s largest cloud provider, has also put numbers on its exposure. Chief executive Octave Klaba said on 31 October that it sends an average of 324 gigabits a second to French internet providers. Over a year, that is roughly 1.28 billion gigabytes, or about €70.25 million in gross tax before caps. Klaba has said OVHcloud would pass the charge on to its customers.

Lhardit said carrying the TF1 group’s five channels on internet boxes would cost €200,000 to €300,000 a year: “entirely negligible.”

What happens next

The vote does not create a tax. The amendment sits in the first part of the 2027 finance bill, at first reading, and the government opposes it. Even if it survives, the collection method would depend on a decree that has not been written.

The next step was scheduled for Tuesday, 3 November 2026, when the Assembly was due to vote on the whole first part of the budget. If that vote fails, the government’s original text, without the tax, goes to the Senate, where the centre-right Les Républicains lead the majority and are not expected to keep the amendment.

The government has another route. Under Article 49.3, it can push the budget through without a vote, picking which adopted amendments stay in the text, so it could simply leave this one out. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has promised to avoid it unless Parliament obstructs, but Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet urged him on 27 October to use it. The clock also matters: the Assembly has 40 days for its first reading and Parliament 70 days in all, after which the government can enact the budget by ordinance. A court challenge would be almost certain if the tax survived.

Why it matters beyond France

France is not the first country to try taxing the flow of data, and the earlier attempts are a warning. South Korea moved to a “sending party pays” rule in 2016. Facebook switched off a cache inside one provider, and latency for some users more than quadrupled. Twitch left the country in February 2024, citing network costs it called prohibitively expensive. The French version would send the money to the state, not the networks.

Other countries have tried taxing the digital giants on revenue instead. When Canada introduced its digital services tax, Google added a 2.5 per cent surcharge on Canadian ads, and Canada rescinded the tax on 29 June 2025 to advance trade talks with the United States.

For readers in Pakistan, the story matters because the same platforms are in daily use here, and governments everywhere are searching for ways to tax companies whose profits are hard to pin to any one country. France has just tried the most literal version yet: tax the data itself.

Frequently asked questions

Is France now charging people for every gigabyte they use?

No. The National Assembly voted for an amendment to the 2027 budget bill, not a law. The tax would be paid by the companies sending the data, not by internet users, and it still has to survive the budget process, the Senate and possibly Article 49.3. Nothing changes for subscribers for now.

Would my Netflix subscription go up?

Not automatically. Netflix would decide whether to absorb the charge, raise prices or change its service. The French technology site Clubic called a rise in Netflix, Disney+ or gaming subscriptions a possibility, not an automatic consequence.

How much money would the tax raise?

The sponsors say €10 billion a year, based on Arcep’s estimate of about 200 billion gigabytes of traffic a year to French internet subscribers. The arithmetic gives €11 billion before caps, leaving almost no room for the caps to bite. Neither figure came with a published costing.

Why did only 35 deputies vote?

The vote took place on a Friday morning during the Assembly’s long examination of the budget, when attendance is usually low. The 35 deputies who took part were about 6 per cent of the 577-seat chamber. It passed because 10 Rassemblement National deputies present chose to abstain rather than vote against it.

What happens next?

The Assembly was due to vote on the whole first part of the budget on Tuesday, 3 November 2026. If the amendment survives that vote, it goes to the Senate, where the centre-right majority is not expected to keep it. The government could also remove it using Article 49.3, and if it somehow became law, a challenge at the Conseil constitutionnel would be almost certain.

Has any country tried taxing internet traffic before?

South Korea is the closest example. After it moved to a “sending party pays” rule between internet providers in 2016, Facebook switched off a cache inside one provider and latency for some users more than quadrupled, and Twitch left the country in February 2024, citing network costs it called prohibitively expensive. Canada tried a digital services tax on revenue, then rescinded it in June 2025.

Conclusion

Five and a half euro cents a gigabyte is close to nothing on a song, and real money on the things that dominate home internet traffic: a 4K evening is about a euro, a big game is €5 to €12, and a household using 250 gigabytes a month carries about €14 before caps. The companies would owe it, up to their caps, and decide whether to pass it on.

Whether it gets that far depends on a budget process the government controls. As of 30 October 2026, the tax has cleared one narrow vote, by 11 to 10, in a chamber where only 35 deputies were present. The sponsors have an original idea and a €10 billion promise with no published costing behind it. The government has the votes, the procedure and the clock on its side. The question the debate did not settle, who will end up paying, will decide whether the gigabyte tax becomes a law or a footnote.

This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.

Sources

Faizan Altaf

Faizan Altaf is the founder and author of findivoza.com, a news blog covering world, Pakistan, business, technology, health and sport in plain English. He writes for general readers who want clear, trustworthy news without jargon. His work focuses on explaining what happened, why it matters, and what to watch next.

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