The Assembly votes for a tax of 5.5 cents per GB downloaded: who will pay the bill in the end, in your opinion?

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What if every gigabyte downloaded during the month ended up showing up on the bill? This Friday, October 30, as part of the finance bill for 2027, the National Assembly adopted a hell of an amendment that Internet users have not stopped hearing about: a tax of 0.055 euros (5.5 cents) per gigabyte of data sent by web giants.

The vote, passed by eleven votes to ten despite the unfavorable opinion of the government and the general rapporteur of the text, nevertheless came a long way. The measure, entitled "tax on producers of digital data", was initially rejected by parliamentarians in the Assembly's finance committee on October 9.

And yet, this provision made its way back into public session. Supported by the socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit, it therefore asks Internet service providers (Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom, Free, etc.) to count the gigabytes delivered to their subscribers, and each transmitter will have to pay 5.5 cents per gigabyte.

For the signatories of the amendment, it is a good model because it “does not pose a problem of obstruction of private life to the extent that the data is never consulted (only their quantity is assessed)”. All you have to do is note the extent of the flow that passes to the subscriber, note who is sending this data, and apply the calculation.

According to the socialist group, it “also has an ecological virtue since it will naturally lead data transmitters to use the most advanced technologies in terms of compression and optimization of the volumes of data to be transmitted”. Clearly, to pay less, you will have to be more efficient.

What does that mean, in theory? For a large video game of 200 gigabytes downloaded on a console, the bill amounts to 11 euros tax. We talk a lot about the weight of GTA 6 for example, the future hit from Rockstar, whose space on the disk would reach 210 gigabytes (not to mention future updates): it would therefore cost around 11.55 euros to the issuer.

And your digital life becomes peaceful Bitdefender Premium Security is a European cybersecurity solution that automatically protects you against hackers and all web threats. Enjoy your online activities with complete peace of mind Sponsored Cybersecurity is on sale The authors of the amendment expect 10 billion euros per year, based on figures from Arcep, the telecoms regulator. This estimates the annual traffic to French subscribers at 200 billion gigabytes, or 11 billion euros in tax at the chosen rate, before capping.

Not everyone is in the same boat. According to Arcep, cited in the amendment, half of the traffic comes from five players: Google (which owns YouTube in particular), Meta (with Instagram and Facebook, in particular), Amazon, Netflix and Akamai (the latter is a content distribution network, which offers file storage and duplication services).

Machine-translated from French