This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
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.
> 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.
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.
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
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.
This is quite stupid, but I really wish those who are quick to jump on a ridiculous piece of legislation as supposed proof of Europe's downfall would be as critical discussing consequences of underregulation.
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.
> they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
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.
That is not the reason for this tax, which is called a private copying levy[1], by the way.
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.
5 and a half cent per Gb?! Thats pretty wild. I would pay at least 10 euros a month in tax. My friends in EU pay like 50 euros for shitty fiber, will they now need to pay 60? That pretty wild. I am all for light apps and low traffic and perma computing but wow.
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
Is everyone you know able to classify a business they run from their home connection as being a "content provider"? That's crazy, I know one person/entity who'd be considered as such.
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?
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
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.
>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.
It's not even clear yet if this would include self-hosted stuff like if you host a website for your FOSS project or a Tor relay. What news website you got that from, as the linked session notes doesn't clarify that at all.
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.
If you are right, you can bet that YouTube-France will have Ad's every 2 seconds and Netflix gets really expensive, maybe the French Government really wants Piracy ;)
He means the part he's quoted with the ">" symbol.
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.
It completely depends what you want from system and how efficient it will be. Want social protections dialed to 11 (like even small government bureaucrats getting golden parachutes worth 1-2 years of their salary while being otherwise practically un-fireable, regardless if they are actually needed... in fact most perm folks are extremely hard to let go). Or you want strong economic prosperity. Cannot have both, the best mix is Switzerland but French will die sooner to the last person before they would admit somebody did state and laws things better than them and that they should maybe get inspired a bit.
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.
Yeah, the tech powerhouse seems to refer to the US. There is no doubt that US dominates a lot of tech at the moments, China dominates a lot of manufacturing.
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.
Wow it's almost like they're not taxing pirated music at all and are taxing gigabytes. I suppose France is more like a farm of users and they're not entitled to their natural resources because users are inherently slaves to globalized capitalism.
Imagine a US House of Representatives passes a law that allows higher taxes for obese people. And someone would say: “lol it’s fake news, it will never pass the senate”. Even if it doesn’t pass the Senate later, it’s huge news now that it passed the House in the first place.
It seems likely this will never pass esp in this political environment, but maybe legislators should consider the international reputation costs of stupid decisions.
Their job is quite literally to sit in sessions and discuss potential laws, this is what us taxpayers give them money to do. It's not embarrassing to talk about whatever laws, regardless of how stupid because again, this is their job, they're evaluating things.
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.
That it made it even this far is ridiculous. I would chalk it up to the "boomer mentality" of out of touch politicians rather that a Europe vs America thing though.
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.
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.
Here is the actual amendment [1] and also it is not yet law. It's not a tax on individuals using the internet. It's a tax on companies providing content to the customers of ISPs. There is a cap on the tax.
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]
This can be seen as a "look europe, we are trying to address our huge debt peoblem (which is 120% of gdp in 2026), please continue to help us". France as well as the French themselves do not want to address the extreme cost of their early pensions to their budget (25% of the 2026 budget!). The retirees and employees often get amazing perks from the government. Employees and retirees of EDF get a 90% discount on their gas and electric bill. 21% of the total workforce works for government... Meanwhile kids can't get a decent education, I would be pissed off too.
Ah, the game of what can be taxed that has the least lobbyists to protect it - it's a game that plays out as a decline for civilizations because government representatives aren't representing the interests of the people of the nation. And because the biggest entities with money have the most lobbyists.
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.
YouTube is crushing our national TV product, so let's tax YouTube.
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.
Note that it will be for professional content provider, and they especially aim at the 20 biggest platforms, providing free content to France and taking advantage of its national market (think gafam)
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 .
French government should buy a bunch of subscriptions like netflix or cheap games on Steam that have large download sizes and just download all day. Pay the monthly $20, then recover 10x that from taxing the CDN.
You can solve your government's finances with this one weird trick!
This is a great opportunity for the ML startups still at the "training on CIFAR datasets" stage from the 2010's. Now that CDN's will be serving 32x32 downscaled images to geolocated French, those algorithms are topical again.
tbh, I don't understand why people are talking trash about this, I don't myself know if this would helps France but this is not a tax of individuals, if is like a border tax on US big corp imported GBs.
As usual, from time to time, France look at these companies and shave them a little bit, this is not a surprise.
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.
The link seems to be the minutes of a parliamentary debate about a multitude of topics. It does not explain what this tax is about and I guess there is another approval step in the senate (French is neither my mother tongue nor am I fowolling French politics)
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.
What is the reason? Seems like absolute taxing the wrong thing. It is not attached to any cost for the government, not revenue or income directly and I can't see a reason to put people off using data (like you might do with pollution taxes) so why? (I don't speak or read French).
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).
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
Let's say that traffic (anything: ssh, sftp, http) enters a VPS in OVH in France from a laptop in Italy (Italian ISP) and some bot in the USA (eg googlebot) or some real person download something from that VPS (US ISP). Who's paying what? There are sent and received bytes for all parties.
Yeah unless they don't, though. They're only going to pay if they actually do business in France. Otherwise there is no legal or practical mechanism for the French government to compel them to pay.
Bonjour! I'm from Kazakhstan. I just uploaded few kibibytes of HTTP requests into elysee.fr. How do I pay for it now? Do they accept VISA? I don't want to evade taxes!
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.
How long until one of these dipshit regulators are going to FAFO and find their connections to the backbone are severed because no one wants to play with them anymore?
The situation is the exact opposite of what leftists and europoors think: American billionaires basically fund the US and pay taxes regardless of residence. Whereas in Europe the so-called middle class (1200€/mo pre-tax in the relatively “wealthy” areas where I live) pay the bulk of the taxes, and the wealthy use all kinds of loopholes in order to avoid paying any.
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.
> American billionaires basically fund the US and pay taxes regardless of residence
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.
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.
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.
Lmfao
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 .
You can solve your government's finances with this one weird trick!
Introducing Mistral Le chat ou n'est pas le chat?
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.
[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.
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.
Don't Invest as a IT-Firm, if power is ~cheap but data expensive....well there are better places.
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).
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
Is it even a clear problem to figure out which business pays what?
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.
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.
This is not final and may well be struck down later, either in new vote or by the Senate.
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" ?
Instead, decamping to Florida, Texas or wherever else seems to me to very much paying quite a lot of regard to residence ?