Gigabyte tax: already out of the 2027 budget, can it come back again?

Adopted on October 30 by one vote, the tax of 5.5 cents per gigabyte disappeared from the 2027 budget on November 4, swept away by the rejection of the entire revenue section in the National Assembly. No one has committed to reintroducing it in the Senate, and the operators who should have counted these gigabytes for the tax authorities are defending a completely different approach.

Voted on October 30 by 11 votes to 10, in a hemicycle which had only 35 voters, the gigabyte tax is already no longer included in the 2027 budget. On November 4, the National Assembly rejected the first part of the finance bill, that of revenue, by 458 votes to 0 with 2 abstentions. The amendments adopted in this part disappear with it, and it is the government's initial text, without this tax, that the Senate must examine, according to LCP. Two of the eleven favorable deputies, the rebellious Éric Coquerel and Abdelkader Lahmar, had also made it known after the vote that they wanted to vote against and abstain respectively, without this modifying the official result.

The amendment from the Socialist MP Laurent Lhardit took up an idea from the Socialist Party program, which this summer set the rate at 0.10 euros. It planned to charge content providers 0.055 euros for each gigabyte sent to French subscribers, up to 15% of their turnover in France or 2% of their global turnover. An hour of 4K film on Netflix, which can consume up to 7 GB, would have cost the platform nearly 40 cents. Its author expected 10 billion euros per year, based on the 200 billion gigabytes that Arcep estimates are sent to subscribers each year. The large platforms would have paid most of the bill: according to Arcep, Akamai, Netflix, Amazon, Google and Meta together represented 49% of traffic to French internet users at the end of 2025. The government, opposed to the measure, however estimated that half of the sum would fall on smaller content providers, particularly French ones.

In this system, internet service providers would not have paid anything, but they would have had to measure the volumes sent by each issuer and transmit these statements to the tax administration each quarter. A role that the French Telecoms Federation (FFT), which notably represents Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom, but not Free, does not want. “For us, it is first of all problematic because it is a very big administrative burden for the operators,” explained its general director, Romain Bonenfant, to L’Usine Digitale. According to him, the mechanism would amount to constituting “a kind of large register of all internet flows between all issuers, all clients”.

The operators are defending another approach, which Orange was already demanding in 2021 with other European operators and which is today being debated in Brussels within the framework of the Digital Networks Act: negotiating directly with the large platforms the price of transporting their data, with an independent arbitrator in the event of disagreement. “We remain in the commercial world, that is to say we have costs, we just want to charge costs,” summarizes Romain Bonenfant. The money would then go to companies deploying fiber and 5G, and not to the state budget. The FFT recalls that operators already pay 1.7 billion euros per year in taxes specific to telecoms, without this sum being allocated to the networks. Free, who does not sit on the federation, spoke through its founder, Xavier Niel, who described the deputies who voted for the tax as “incompetent ignoramuses”.

Machine-translated from French