French Assembly approves €0.055/GB internet traffic tax against government advice

What happened

France's National Assembly has approved a tax of €0.055 on every gigabyte of internet traffic delivered to subscribers in the country, according to the Hacker News front-page headline that surfaced the story. The official session record from the Assemblée nationale confirms the debate that preceded the vote — an examination of the finance bill for 2027 on Friday, 30 October 2026 — though the published excerpt ends before the roll call itself.

The measure arrived as amendment no. 1358, tabled by deputy Laurent Lhardit, during discussion of the first part of the 2027 budget. Its defining feature is who pays: content providers — the services sending data to French internet users — rather than consumers or the access providers carrying the traffic.

How the levy is designed

Introducing the amendment, Lhardit put its estimated yield at €10 billion a year and argued it would fall mainly on global digital giants, because they generate the overwhelming share of traffic reaching French subscribers. He framed it as a correction of fiscal unfairness between France's struggling physical retailers and the US and Asian online-commerce platforms that largely escape tax relative to the value they extract from the French market.

He also claimed the design fixes the flaws that sank similar attempts in Canada and South Korea: the tax base is a physical volume, measured in France at the point where traffic enters the networks, which he described as indisputable, and he said the scheme respects net neutrality.

How novel the mechanism is showed even in the procedure. Fellow deputy Mickaël Bouloux, merely asking for extra speaking time, noted that an unprecedented scheme of this kind needed explanation of its tax base, its anonymised measurement, its capping arrangements and its expected yield. Taken together, the reported €0.055 per gigabyte rate and the €10 billion estimate imply a taxable volume on the order of 180 exabytes of traffic per year.

Committee and government advised rejection

Philippe Juvin, general rapporteur of the finance committee, recommended voting the amendment down. His concern was not the principle of taxing large platforms but the effect: the major tech companies hold disproportionate market power, and the likely outcome is that the cost gets passed on to advertisers.

Budget minister David Amiel opposed the amendment on practical and distributional grounds. As he read the mechanism, it would oblige operators to deploy traffic sensors or measure flows on individual receiving terminals. More damaging to the proposal's stated aim, he said around half of the roughly €10 billion — some €5 billion — would land not on the large digital companies but on smaller content providers, including French ones. He pointed to existing instruments such as the digital services tax (TSN) as the proper channel; an interjection from the floor noted that an increase of that tax had not been voted.

The adoption, as reported, therefore came against the advice of both the committee's rapporteur and the government.

Why it matters

A per-gigabyte levy scales with bandwidth, so the heaviest emitters — video streaming, cloud workloads, game downloads, AI services — face the largest bills. But the minister's own arithmetic suggests the incidence would reach far beyond the US giants the amendment targets, and Juvin's warning about advertisers points to the standard pass-through risk: costs landing on advertisers, publishers or users rather than being absorbed by platforms.

Implementation is the second open question. Metering traffic at network entry points or on end devices, with anonymisation and caps doing the privacy work, would be a substantial technical build, and the government's skepticism about its feasibility is now on the record.

Finally, precedent. Lhardit pitched the scheme as the design that survives where Canada and South Korea failed. If it holds through the rest of the budget process, France will have a second digital levy alongside its existing digital services tax, and a template that other governments are likely to study closely.