French lawmakers have put a proposed per-gigabyte levy into the first-reading text of the 2027 budget. The National Assembly approved the Socialist amendment on Friday by 11 votes to 10. The charge would be €0.055 per gigabyte and would target companies delivering data to internet users in France.
Who would pay
The levy would apply to data producers, including content and service providers such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, and Akamai. Lawmaker Laurent Lhardit led the amendment. Its authors expect €10 billion a year. They cite Arcep’s estimate that French internet providers deliver about 200 billion gigabytes annually, with half attributed to those five companies.
The charge would be capped at 15% of the sender’s French revenue or 2% of global revenue. The text says measurement would cover data quantities only and would not access content being delivered.
Traffic counting, not content checks
Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom, and Free would measure how much data reaches their customers and identify the sender. They would submit anonymized, aggregated figures quarterly to the tax authority, with Arcep supervising. For traffic routed through a content delivery network, the calculation would count total data leaving that network. The amendment says the measurement method already exists and was developed with industry specialists.
VideoLAN, the nonprofit behind VLC, estimates the tax would cost it more than €1 million a year. In a post on X, it criticized lawmakers for approving a tax it said they did not understand. Steam data showed 62.7 petabytes delivered in France over seven days. At the proposed rate, that would be about €3.4 million for the week, or roughly €180 million a year before caps. A 200-gigabyte game download would trigger €11 in tax. Arcep’s average fixed-line use of about 267 gigabytes a month would translate theoretically to almost €15 monthly. These are calculations of the proposed levy, not direct subscriber charges.
Opposition and next steps
The government opposed the amendment, and the finance committee had rejected it earlier in October. Friday’s vote still put it into the budget text at first reading. Budget minister David Amiel said smaller content providers, many French, would bear half the burden. The amendment’s authors say the tax would make global technology companies contribute based on activity serving French households rather than where they declare profits.
The Senate is next, where the conservative Republicans hold a majority. Separately, National Assembly president Yaël Braun-Pivet has urged Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to use Article 49.3 to push the budget through without a vote.
