Is it even a clear problem to figure out which business pays what?
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.
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 objective seems to be to target fournisseurs de contenu (content providers), and the mentioned collection mechanism identifies a entreprise émettrice (sending company). 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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
Don't Invest as a IT-Firm, if power is ~cheap but data expensive....well there are better places.
You can solve your government's finances with this one weird trick!
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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•1h ago