France's new 'internet tax', which was meant to stop tech giants from sending huge amounts of data to your smartphone, has been killed off

Date:
Thu, 05 Nov 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Description:
France's per-gigabyte "internet tax" on Netflix, Google and Meta lasted only five days before the budget it rode in on was rejected 458-0.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter French deputies voted 11 to 10 to tax content providers 0.055 for every gigabyte sent to French internet subscribers Backers claim 10 billion a year in taxes, but the government disputes both the figure and whether traffic can be measured fairly Five days later, the Assembly rejected the budget's whole revenue section 458 to 0, wiping out the tax with it France's lower house had voted to charge content companies for every gigabyte they deliver to French internet users - but the measure lasted only five days before it was shot down unanimously.

Deputies rejected the revenue half of the 2027 budget by a vote of 458 to 0, LCP reported . Every amendment adopted during three weeks of debate fell with it, including the per-gigabyte levy; this means that what now goes to the Senate is the government's original bill, which never contained it to begin with. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here: How a gigabyte
would have become a tax bill The amendment, tabled by Socialist deputy
Laurent Lhardit, would have required content providers to pay 0.055 (roughly $0.06) per gigabyte delivered to customers of French internet providers.

It passed at the opening of the 9 am sitting on Friday, October 30, with just 35 of the National Assembly's 577 deputies taking part: 11 voted for, 10 against and 14 abstained, according to the official session transcript . Both the government and the finance committee's general rapporteur, Philippe
Juvin, opposed it. Its authors said it would raise around 10 billion ($11.2 billion) a year . You may like France blocks under-15 social media ban over freedom of expression fears UK government considers extending BBC license fee to streaming services Russia to double internet censorship budget in 2027, plotting new VPN traffic fee

The mechanics are spelled out in the amendment itself : Internet providers, along with any company selling internet access to households or businesses, would count the data flowing to their customers and attribute it to whoever sent it, under the supervision of telecoms regulator Arcep and France's tax authority.

Senders would be identified by company name and their Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) registration number, and no record of what the data contained or where it went could be demanded. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me
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The move has not only found obvious opposition within French politicians
after its surprise initial approval in a nearly empty chamber, but has found surprisingly vocal critics at home: VideoLAN, the nonprofit behind VLC,
warned the levy would cost it more than 1 million a year, MacGeneration reports , though Lhardit replied that the caps would protect it. The founder of a national ISP, Free, Xavier Niel, dismissed the deputies on X as
"ignorant incompetents."

OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba, whose company raised some server prices by up to 87% this autumn over memory costs, calculated that on a 100Gbit/s transit port costing around 6,300 a month, the tax on his assumed traffic would reach 1.02 million a month. He put OVHcloud's exposure at 23 million to 70 million
a year.

Even the operators who would have done the counting were unenthusiastic. The French Telecoms Federation, which represents Orange, Bouygues Telecom and
SFR, does not reject the idea that big platforms should contribute more to networks, according to Freenews , but it is worried about the technical and administrative load of a scheme whose revenue would go to the treasury rather than to networks, and would rather see commercial negotiations with the platforms. What to read next EU study proposes 30-minute takedown of illegal streams, and your VPN is in the crosshairs EU copyright overhaul risks
forcing VPNs to police the internet here's what we know US bill threatens to turn your VPN into a piracy blocklist

The solemn vote on the revenue section was due on Tuesday, November 3, but it slipped because 758 amendments were still unexamined at midnight on Monday, NosParlementaires noted . It came on Wednesday evening instead, and no group voted for the amended text, essentially killing the entire proposal in its tracks before the French Senate got involved.

To reappear, the tax would need a senator to refile it and a chamber controlled by the center-right Les Rpublicains to back it, which Next considered unlikely.

The idea itself is not going away: The Socialists put a 0.10-per-gigabyte version in the program they presented this summer, ahead of next year's presidential election. There is, however, international pressure and considerations that would ensure this never actually happens, even as countries vie to attract the most AI infrastructure investments, and this could be the biggest dealbreaker for multiple players.

Beyond France, it runs against the tide. Brussels spent years fielding
telecom operators' demands that Big Tech chip in for network upgrades, the so-called "fair share" fight , and in January the European Commission's Digital Networks Act proposed only a voluntary cooperation mechanism rather than mandatory network fees.

Then there is Washington: Donald Trump has long threatened tariffs on countries that tax US tech firms , and in June 2026 he warned of 100% tariffs on any country implementing a digital services tax on American companies. A per-gigabyte levy whose biggest payers would be Google , Meta, Amazon , and Netflix would be hard to present as anything other than that.

For now, the proposal stands killed; nothing has changed on anyone's phone or internet bill, and, seemingly, for the 2027 budget at least, nothing will.
But the idea could show up in other forms in the near future. Follow
TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.



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