Gigabyte tax voted by MPs: how much for GTA 6, Netflix and your Bitcoin node?

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The socialist amendment targets Google, Netflix and their cloud cousins. It lands in a 2027 budget project which has already been heavily used in crypto taxation, and gigabytes have an unfortunate tendency to end up on the customer's bill.

The text bears the number I-1358. PS MP Laurent Lhardit submitted it on October 9 with around sixty colleagues. However, the finance committee initially rejected it. He therefore returned through the session, on a Friday, in front of 35 deputies present. Eleven said yes.

The mechanism creates a “tax on producers of digital data” in the General Tax Code. Concretely, access providers should count each quarter the volumes that each transmitter sends to their customers. Arcep and the DGFiP would supervise everything. Without looking at the content or the destination, swears the device.

The price is 0.055 euros per gigabyte. According to the presentation of the amendment, Arcep estimates the annual traffic delivered to French subscribers at 200 billion GB. Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai account for half of it alone. Expected return: 10 billion euros per year. Raw multiplication gives 11 billion, rounding is generous.

The government doesn't want it. Public Accounts Minister David Amiel questioned the feasibility of the system. He also warned that almost half of the revenue would come from smaller players, French included. A ceiling is planned, set at 15% of turnover generated in France or 2% of global turnover. The text writes “or” without saying which applies. We love these little details.

Let's start with the cases that speak to everyone. Reduced to usage, the gigabyte tax quickly transforms cents into euros:

On a game sold for 80 euros for download, 11.55 euros of tax represents 14% of the price. For a 40 GB free-to-play, on the other hand, the tax falls on a product which does not generate anything on installation.

This is where the ceiling comes into play. The presentation of the amendment justifies it for sectors that consume data per euro earned, video on demand and video games in the lead. Let's calculate the worst. Let’s take a publisher taxed at the ceiling of 15% of its French turnover. To maintain the same net revenue, it would have to raise its prices by 17.6%, because 1 divided by 0.85 gives 1.176. Your 80 euro game would go to 94 euros.

There remains the case that interests us. To run a full node, this software which keeps an integral copy of the blockchain and verifies each transaction, you must download the history of the network since 2009. That is 779.01 GB as of October 28 according to Blockchain.com, compared to 696 GB a year earlier.

Machine-translated from French