France's Assembly votes 0.055€/GB data tax aimed at streaming, cloud and gaming services

A one-vote margin in the National Assembly

France's National Assembly has narrowly approved an amendment to the country's finance bill that would charge online content providers 0.055 euros for every gigabyte of data they deliver to users in France. According to Les Numériques, the measure passed in public session by the slimmest possible margin: 11 votes in favour and 10 against.

The amendment, numbered I-1358, was tabled by the Socialist group and its allies, and it overcame opposition from both the government and the general rapporteur. Its backers estimate the levy could generate as much as 10 billion euros in revenue by taxing the real traffic volumes of digital companies operating in France.

The tax would be paid by content providers, not by internet users directly, but the range of companies in scope covers a large share of everyday internet use.

How the levy would be measured

Under the proposal described by Les Numériques, French internet service providers would be responsible for recording, each quarter, how much data every company transmits to users in France. The measurements would be jointly supervised by Arcep, the telecoms regulator, and the Directorate General of Public Finance. Content delivery networks, the relay servers run by companies like Cloudflare, Akamai and Fastly that sit close to end users, are expressly included so that traffic served from edge caches counts toward the total.

To avoid choking high-bandwidth services with thin margins, the amendment caps what any single company can owe: no more than 15 percent of its French revenue, or 2 percent of its worldwide revenue.

Alongside the budgetary goal, the amendment's authors point to an ecological rationale, arguing that a per-gigabyte cost will push platforms to compress and optimize their data flows.

A very broad net

Les Numériques lays out just how wide the scope would be:

• Video streaming and live platforms, including Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Prime Video, Twitch and TikTok, alongside French catch-up services such as TF1+, France.tv and MyCanal, which account for most downstream traffic.
• Game stores and networks such as Steam, the Epic Games Store, PlayStation Network and Xbox Network, whose installation files and updates frequently weigh 50 to 150 gigabytes.
• AI and code hosting services like Hugging Face and GitHub, where model and dataset downloads can run to tens of gigabytes per file and are often distributed free of charge.
• Cloud storage and hosting: Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud and Dropbox, plus infrastructure providers AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
• Social and communication apps including Instagram, X, Discord, Teams and Zoom.
• Operating system updates for Windows, macOS, iOS and Linux distributions.

The figures highlighted in Les Numériques' report illustrate the arithmetic: at 0.055 euros per gigabyte, a single film would add roughly 0.45 euros to the provider's bill, while a blockbuster game on the scale of GTA VI would add around 12 euros.

How it could reach users

Although consumers would not be taxed directly, the economic effects would likely reach them. Les Numériques notes that affected companies could respond by folding the cost into subscription prices, restricting bandwidth delivered to French connections, or imposing limits on very large file downloads in order to stay under the statutory cap.

Why it matters

The amendment is not yet law. It still faces examination by the Senate and must overcome the reservations already expressed by the executive before it can be definitively written into the finance bill, and a one-vote margin in the Assembly points to a fragile majority.

If it survives, France would put in place what Les Numériques describes as an unprecedented tax on data volume. That model creates unusual incentives: every gigabyte shipped to France would carry a direct cost, which could accelerate compression and caching efficiency, or it could fragment the European internet, with services treating French users as a distinct and more expensive audience to serve. For streaming platforms, game stores and cloud providers, the immediate questions are whether the 15 percent and 2 percent caps hold, and how much of the bill ultimately lands in subscription prices.