Gigabyte tax: an Internet user presents an “invoice” of 10,000 euros to the MP at the origin of the text
To denounce the tax on digital data, Internet users have chosen to take its defenders at their word: count what repeated downloads on their own sites would cost. A provocation which raises a relevant question, even if…
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“Good evening @LaurentLhardit! » On His counter shows more than 214 million downloads of the elected official's personal site, for an amount of 10,237.20 euros. “We can round up to 20k, it will take a few more hours,” he adds.
The “invoice” is a priori theoretical. The idea is above all to turn against Laurent Lhardit the principle of the tax that he defends: to make content providers pay according to the volume of data they send to French Internet users.
As a reminder, on October 30, 2026, the National Assembly adopted its amendment to the finance bill for 2027, by 11 votes to 10. Éric Coquerel has since disavowed his favorable vote, claiming to have “put the wrong button” with another LFI deputy.
The principle of the tax? Internet service providers (Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom, Free, etc.) would be responsible for counting the gigabytes transmitted to their subscribers and identifying the companies that send them. The latter would then have to pay 5.5 cents per gigabyte transmitted.
Another PDF on Marc Bloch to keep the clock ticking Another Internet user, under the pseudonym mizmo, attacked the same principle with a file hosted on the Socialist Party website. “It’s Sunday, I’m bored,” he writes, before presenting a PDF on Marc Bloch of around 44 MB.
It describes a small program that downloads the document, deletes it and then starts again, accounting for what these transfers would cost the party. On its last capture, the counter displays 13,109 downloads, or approximately 576 GB and 31.70 euros of theoretical tax. For this demonstration, he uses a copy of the PDF on his computer: the PS site is therefore not requested for each download.
The reasoning, however, is easy to understand: each download involves sending data from a server. If this data is taxed, multiplying requests could increase the amount to be paid by their issuer, without bringing them any additional income.
Christophe Boutry's calculation (for Laurent Lhardit), however, contains an error: his interface indicates a tax of “0.055 centimes” per gigabyte, while the amendment provides for 0.055 euros, or a hundred times more. Applied to the 18.6 million gigabytes displayed by its meter, this price would give approximately 1.02 million euros before capping, and not 10,000 euros.
This does not mean that the MP should pay this amount. The text provides for a ceiling of 15% of turnover achieved in France or 2% of total turnover. It would also be necessary to determine who would be considered the content provider for his site: there is nothing to confirm that Laurent Lhardit would be personally liable.
Machine-translated from French
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- Numerama2 Nov, 10:33
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