Is it even a clear problem to figure out which business pays what?
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.
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 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.
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.
That would make Netflix like 30-50% more expensive.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
But all usual troll that like to trash talk on Europe at every occasion will be there to add their comment.
This is not final and may well be struck down later, either in new vote or by the Senate.
[1] https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/05/30/france-germany-uk-number...
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.
You shouldn't. Nor should you conclude anything general about the EU from something French politicans do. It's disingenuous.
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.
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
Tax their bloody real estate into poverty because that's the only message they'll understand.
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.
manarth•49m ago