This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Yes, France is in the EU. The actions of France do not equate to the actions of the EU.
Despite what pro-Brexit type people will tell you, there is a lot of sovereignty in local laws within the EU. And the ability to set your own taxes is one of them.
> Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Mind you we have a hungarian private torrent tracker with 400k users and 2.7 petabyte of data running since 2005. Virtually everyone is using it in the country but no one really wants to shut it down because at this point it's also a cultural archive.
5 and a half cent per Gb?! Thats pretty wild. I would pay at least 10 euros a month in tax. My friends in EU pay like 50 euros for shitty fiber, will they now need to pay 60? That pretty wild. I am all for light apps and low traffic and perma computing but wow.
Counterpoint: I am behind the gfw.. and seriously dont understand how anyone can get anything done… but it still seems to work… i pay like 2 euros for 500MBit fiber
> they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Yes, but... isn't their assumption mostly correct? Spotify and Co have changed the equation in the sense that one doesn't have files anymore but when those laws came out they targeted MP3 players and DVDs who were, indeed, full of pirated media.
I don't like the result for other reasons, but the assumption seemed always relatively accurate.
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
There are people who consider this a good thing. I don’t have a strong opinion on it, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.
>but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.
Because its not a problem for Big-corp, but Opensource-Projects/Tor-Nodes, for example i would have to pay ~10$ a day just for my Tor-Relay. It's deeply Anti-Democratic and the opposite what the Internet should be.
It completely depends what you want from system and how efficient it will be. Want social protections dialed to 11 (like even small government bureaucrats getting golden parachutes worth 1-2 years of their salary while being otherwise practically un-fireable, regardless if they are actually needed... in fact most perm folks are extremely hard to let go). Or you want strong economic prosperity. Cannot have both, the best mix is Switzerland but French will die sooner to the last person before they would admit somebody did state and laws things better than them and that they should maybe get inspired a bit.
What french public conveniently fails to grasp and loses 100% of my support is the naive expectation that in struggling economy they should be rich, while having social system actually dialed to 12 since that 11 is never enough for them. And have 0 doubt, all the protesters now and also before are at the end after money. Money will magically appear in government budget and in all salaries, prices of petrol/diesel will be magically ultra low regardless of yet another failed war being waged by US causing massive rise in prices globally. If one doesn't travel around the world and just lives there it may feel like a normal default system, but given reality of the world out there its anything but.
Lets talk like adults what is achievable or not and manage expectations accordingly. Not very french way, is it. I predict it will get much worse in France before there is chance to get things better again, and how much depends on their ultra comfy, some would even say spoiled population.
Yeah, the tech powerhouse seems to refer to the US. There is no doubt that US dominates a lot of tech at the moments, China dominates a lot of manufacturing.
The US is a failing democracy ruled by ruthless liars and capitalists. China's surveillance and lack of freedom is beyond discussion. So EU not being a tech powerhouse still does not look too bad.
What a horrible idea. This is like creating a special tax on start up capital. It goes against so many fundamentals, such as increasing efficiency, productivity, automation, carbon. It's just crazy.
Otherwise, this tax would cost me at least 50% of what I pay for all my food, daily.
50 GB of daily traffic is normal for me, sometimes even much more, e.g. one day ago I had a traffic of 1 TB per day, because I downloaded the Mistral Large LLM weights. So to download Mistral, I would have had to pay EUR 55, much more than I pay for a month of Internet access.
1) How it changes behaviour (taxing something usually means less of that thing is produced, and sometimes you want less of something e.g. smoking as a classic example)
2) How much revenue it raises for the treasury after taking into account 1
I cannot help but think that on both counts this is really bad.
This seems like an absurdly high rate of taxation on a resource that if anything we want to increase the volume of. Creating disincentives for high speed/bandwidth connections and services surely means less economic activity net, which means lower revenues and profits to tax across multiple industries. You are creating very direct disincentives on economic activity in a very blunt way. Its not like you are say taxing online gambling activity which is a net social drain on society, this is everything digital/tech.
I can understand that they want to maybe tax mainly foreign tech and media firms, but this seems like the worst way to go about it with a tax that would make up the bulk of the cost to serve.
This can be seen as a "look europe, we are trying to address our huge debt peoblem (which is 120% of gdp in 2026), please continue to help us". France as well as the French themselves do not want to address the extreme cost of their early pensions to their budget (25% of the 2026 budget!). The retirees and employees often get amazing perks from the government. Employees and retirees of EDF get a 90% discount on their gas and electric bill. 21% of the total workforce works for government... Meanwhile kids can't get a decent education, I would be pissed off too.
Ah, the game of what can be taxed that has the least lobbyists to protect it - it's a game that plays out as a decline for civilizations because government representatives aren't representing the interests of the people of the nation.
It seems likely this will never pass esp in this political environment, but maybe legislators should consider the international reputation costs of stupid decisions.
The link seems to be the minutes of a parliamentary debate about a multitude of topics. It does not explain what this tax is about and I guess there is another approval step in the senate (French is neither my mother tongue nor am I fowolling French politics)
That the current internet with social media and AI boom destroys democracies and the planet is a fact. Whether such tax is a good step to slow that down, I have not thought about.
This will show companies not getting away with those GBs! Everyone should pay for extra, this will save republic for the next 100 years at least, increase it next year to 5€ at least
What is the reason? Seems like absolute taxing the wrong thing. It is not attached to any cost for the government, not revenue or income directly and I can't see a reason to put people off using data (like you might do with pollution taxes) so why? (I don't speak or read French).
more tax revenue from any source they can imagine. Instead of trying to cut out the welfare, and reign in spending, it's always easier to propose a tax that's small and widespread (so that each individual may not be incentivized to fight it).
Let's say that traffic (anything: ssh, sftp, http) enters a VPS in OVH in France from a laptop in Italy (Italian ISP) and some bot in the USA (eg googlebot) or some real person download something from that VPS (US ISP). Who's paying what? There are sent and received bytes for all parties.
Bonjour! I'm from Kazakhstan. I just uploaded few kibibytes of HTTP requests into elysee.fr. How do I pay for it now? Do they accept VISA? I don't want to evade taxes!
I remember, in 2025 friends that were into business said something along the lines of France being socially and economically doomed. I didn't know this much wrong could happen all at once.
How long until one of these dipshit regulators are going to FAFO and find their connections to the backbone are severed because no one wants to play with them anymore?
This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Just old people being old people.
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Yes, France is in the EU. The actions of France do not equate to the actions of the EU.
Despite what pro-Brexit type people will tell you, there is a lot of sovereignty in local laws within the EU. And the ability to set your own taxes is one of them.
> Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
I live in Hungary where this is common but it's more like a "you pay tax for storage which goes to the labels, in turn we don't prosecute piracy" https://www.artisjus.hu/english/copyright-in-hungary/
Mind you we have a hungarian private torrent tracker with 400k users and 2.7 petabyte of data running since 2005. Virtually everyone is using it in the country but no one really wants to shut it down because at this point it's also a cultural archive.
5 and a half cent per Gb?! Thats pretty wild. I would pay at least 10 euros a month in tax. My friends in EU pay like 50 euros for shitty fiber, will they now need to pay 60? That pretty wild. I am all for light apps and low traffic and perma computing but wow.
Counterpoint: I am behind the gfw.. and seriously dont understand how anyone can get anything done… but it still seems to work… i pay like 2 euros for 500MBit fiber
My Tax would be around 300+80 Euros (Tor Relay)
Holy moly (tor doesnt really work here)
> they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Yes, but... isn't their assumption mostly correct? Spotify and Co have changed the equation in the sense that one doesn't have files anymore but when those laws came out they targeted MP3 players and DVDs who were, indeed, full of pirated media.
I don't like the result for other reasons, but the assumption seemed always relatively accurate.
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
There are people who consider this a good thing. I don’t have a strong opinion on it, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.
>but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.
Because its not a problem for Big-corp, but Opensource-Projects/Tor-Nodes, for example i would have to pay ~10$ a day just for my Tor-Relay. It's deeply Anti-Democratic and the opposite what the Internet should be.
You mean "it's good that EU will never be a tech powerhouse"? Or you mean "it's good for France to tax large tech companies for internet traffic"?
It completely depends what you want from system and how efficient it will be. Want social protections dialed to 11 (like even small government bureaucrats getting golden parachutes worth 1-2 years of their salary while being otherwise practically un-fireable, regardless if they are actually needed... in fact most perm folks are extremely hard to let go). Or you want strong economic prosperity. Cannot have both, the best mix is Switzerland but French will die sooner to the last person before they would admit somebody did state and laws things better than them and that they should maybe get inspired a bit.
What french public conveniently fails to grasp and loses 100% of my support is the naive expectation that in struggling economy they should be rich, while having social system actually dialed to 12 since that 11 is never enough for them. And have 0 doubt, all the protesters now and also before are at the end after money. Money will magically appear in government budget and in all salaries, prices of petrol/diesel will be magically ultra low regardless of yet another failed war being waged by US causing massive rise in prices globally. If one doesn't travel around the world and just lives there it may feel like a normal default system, but given reality of the world out there its anything but.
Lets talk like adults what is achievable or not and manage expectations accordingly. Not very french way, is it. I predict it will get much worse in France before there is chance to get things better again, and how much depends on their ultra comfy, some would even say spoiled population.
Yeah, the tech powerhouse seems to refer to the US. There is no doubt that US dominates a lot of tech at the moments, China dominates a lot of manufacturing.
The US is a failing democracy ruled by ruthless liars and capitalists. China's surveillance and lack of freedom is beyond discussion. So EU not being a tech powerhouse still does not look too bad.
> Just old people being old people.
Tax their bloody real estate into poverty because that's the only message they'll understand.
Do you conclude the same about the US when some lawmakers in e.g. Texas propose some insane law rooted in the old testament or something?
You shouldn't. Nor should you conclude anything general about the EU from something French politicans do. It's disingenuous.
Worth noting the vote for this law passed 11 to 10, and it's an amendment to the budget which is 100% likely to be thrown out anyway.
Glad to hear it might be thrown out.
What a horrible idea. This is like creating a special tax on start up capital. It goes against so many fundamentals, such as increasing efficiency, productivity, automation, carbon. It's just crazy.
The tax is huge.
Fortunately, I do not live in France.
Otherwise, this tax would cost me at least 50% of what I pay for all my food, daily.
50 GB of daily traffic is normal for me, sometimes even much more, e.g. one day ago I had a traffic of 1 TB per day, because I downloaded the Mistral Large LLM weights. So to download Mistral, I would have had to pay EUR 55, much more than I pay for a month of Internet access.
The average streaming show would be about €0.20 in tax to watch.
That would make Netflix like 30-50% more expensive.
So two ways to look at tax:
1) How it changes behaviour (taxing something usually means less of that thing is produced, and sometimes you want less of something e.g. smoking as a classic example)
2) How much revenue it raises for the treasury after taking into account 1
I cannot help but think that on both counts this is really bad.
This seems like an absurdly high rate of taxation on a resource that if anything we want to increase the volume of. Creating disincentives for high speed/bandwidth connections and services surely means less economic activity net, which means lower revenues and profits to tax across multiple industries. You are creating very direct disincentives on economic activity in a very blunt way. Its not like you are say taxing online gambling activity which is a net social drain on society, this is everything digital/tech.
I can understand that they want to maybe tax mainly foreign tech and media firms, but this seems like the worst way to go about it with a tax that would make up the bulk of the cost to serve.
This can be seen as a "look europe, we are trying to address our huge debt peoblem (which is 120% of gdp in 2026), please continue to help us". France as well as the French themselves do not want to address the extreme cost of their early pensions to their budget (25% of the 2026 budget!). The retirees and employees often get amazing perks from the government. Employees and retirees of EDF get a 90% discount on their gas and electric bill. 21% of the total workforce works for government... Meanwhile kids can't get a decent education, I would be pissed off too.
Ah, the game of what can be taxed that has the least lobbyists to protect it - it's a game that plays out as a decline for civilizations because government representatives aren't representing the interests of the people of the nation.
At this level, the title is fake news, there is approximately zero chance this go in the final law at this point.
But all usual troll that like to trash talk on Europe at every occasion will be there to add their comment.
It seems likely this will never pass esp in this political environment, but maybe legislators should consider the international reputation costs of stupid decisions.
This is not final and may well be struck down later, either in new vote or by the Senate.
The link seems to be the minutes of a parliamentary debate about a multitude of topics. It does not explain what this tax is about and I guess there is another approval step in the senate (French is neither my mother tongue nor am I fowolling French politics)
That the current internet with social media and AI boom destroys democracies and the planet is a fact. Whether such tax is a good step to slow that down, I have not thought about.
Additional discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50308240
So I could troll French visitors of my website by starting a huge data transfer from their browser?
Interesting...
If I am reading the translation correctly, it would be tax on CDNs, so it would be you getting trolled
Selectively for those originating from AS60855.
vive la France!!!
This will show companies not getting away with those GBs! Everyone should pay for extra, this will save republic for the next 100 years at least, increase it next year to 5€ at least
What is the reason? Seems like absolute taxing the wrong thing. It is not attached to any cost for the government, not revenue or income directly and I can't see a reason to put people off using data (like you might do with pollution taxes) so why? (I don't speak or read French).
> What is the reason?
more tax revenue from any source they can imagine. Instead of trying to cut out the welfare, and reign in spending, it's always easier to propose a tax that's small and widespread (so that each individual may not be incentivized to fight it).
Maybe it'll force the internet to go back to analog.
This feels like a wildly scatter gun way of achieving their goals? The collateral damage will be huge and unpredictable
What are their goals? I'm assuming just to raise revenue?
Is it even a clear problem to figure out which business pays what?
The ISP is responsible for collecting the tax so they would know the sources.
Let's say that traffic (anything: ssh, sftp, http) enters a VPS in OVH in France from a laptop in Italy (Italian ISP) and some bot in the USA (eg googlebot) or some real person download something from that VPS (US ISP). Who's paying what? There are sent and received bytes for all parties.
Only from france-based uploaders , right? This applies also to external ones.
France: We have a tax for that.
The uploading entity pays, even if not in France.
Bonjour! I'm from Kazakhstan. I just uploaded few kibibytes of HTTP requests into elysee.fr. How do I pay for it now? Do they accept VISA? I don't want to evade taxes!
I feel confident that all of the illegal video hosting companies are going to pay this tax.
Doesn't France also have cloud infrastructure that offers similar products like AWS S3?
I don't see how a business like cloudflare can remain serving French customers.
OVH is quite big. And Scaleway.
What the fuck is wrong with France?
I remember, in 2025 friends that were into business said something along the lines of France being socially and economically doomed. I didn't know this much wrong could happen all at once.
Just damn. Riots first. Now absurd laws.
Starlink ftw
How long until one of these dipshit regulators are going to FAFO and find their connections to the backbone are severed because no one wants to play with them anymore?
Back to Minitel it is!
Just stop transferring wealth to hoarding boomers and problems will solve themselves.
So if you get DDoSed you can get another huge bill?
The emiter pays, not the receiver
It's less common now, but for many years one of the more popular ways to DDOS someone was to trick a third party into sending them lots of data.
Another comment said it was just some posturing addition to a budget that's already guaranteed to be rejected. Which one is true?
Tax your fooking billionaires.
Better yet, just stop giving them so much money that they become billionaires.