France Briefly Voted To Tax Data By The Gigabyte. It Lasted Five Days.
There are times I wonder if the leaders of France and Australia have a secret bet to see which one of them can come up with worse internet policy than the other. Apparently it's France's turn. As a few sources have been reporting, French lawmakers slipped an amendment into the country's budget bill that is (yet another) attempt by a government to justify a tax on big tech... just 'cause big tech is big. As with most of those taxes, they can't just write a straight tax the big company" law (because then everyone notices it's a targeted shakedown), so instead they invent some proxy that ends up hitting everyone else on the internet. That's why a variety of places (led by Australia) have tried (without much success) to tax links on the internet.
France's counter is (somehow) even dumber: taxing data by the gigabyte, which (thankfully) is going nowhere for now. But don't expect it to stay dead. Here's what French lawmakers actually voted for:
France has approved a proposed tax that aims to tax the amount of internet data per gigabyte sent to French users in the country, with major companies like Google, Netflix, TikTok, and Meta now in the crosshairs. According to minutes released by the National Assembly, members voted 11-10 in support of the motion on October 30 - which now means the new law has been added to the country's next budget, despite major opposition from the government side and the finance committee rapporteur. The law still has to pass through the Senate for final approval. The latest amendment, introduced by socialist lawmaker Laurent Lhardit, could see content providers pay 0.055 (roughly $0.06) to the government for every gigabyte of content distributed to French users.
And, as with most of these stupid laws, the collateral damage is easy to spot. VideoLAN, the nonprofit behind the open-source media player VLC, says the tax would cost it more than 1 million a year.
Everything about this approach seems silly:
Internet providers would measure the data flowing to their customers and note which company sent it, under the text of the amendment. They would report the totals to the tax authorities every quarter, under the supervision of telecoms regulator Arcep. The text bars any record of what the data contains or where it goes.
Some data travels through content delivery networks, which store copies close to users. That data would count as it leaves the network. The text caps the tax at 15% of a company's French revenue or 2% of its global revenue.
The amendment's explanatory note cites an Arcep estimate that 200bn gigabytes reach French internet subscribers each year. It says Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai account for about half of that traffic.
Ok, so those big tech companies account for about half" of that traffic, but even that's deceptive: Akamai and Amazon (and, to a lesser extent, Google) deliver traffic for tons of smaller sites and services, and you can bet the tax gets passed right along to those customers. Not to mention there's still the other half which will land on companies like VideoLAN.
Public accounts minister David Amiel told MPs the scheme would need sensors on the networks, or measurement on users' own devices. Half of the tax would fall on smaller content providers, many of them French, he said. On the authors' own estimate, that is about 5bn. Philippe Juvin, the finance committee's general rapporteur, warned that the big platforms could pass the cost on to advertisers.
Of course, even before it got killed (more on that below), it was never likely to go much further.
The Senate, where the conservative Les Republicains hold a majority, is unlikely to back it, Martin Clavey reported for Next. The government could also force the budget through without a final vote. In that case, it can leave the amendment out of the text, Next noted.
Still, it's worth sitting with how this happened: the amendment passed 11-10, with 14 abstentions, in a chamber with just 35 deputies present. That's how a proposal this dumb ends up in a national budget, even briefly.
As it turns out, the tax lasted five days. On November 4, the National Assembly rejected the budget's entire revenue section, voting it down 458-0, which wiped out every amendment adopted along the way. The Senate will instead take up the government's original text, which never included the gigabyte tax, and nobody with the power to add it back seems interested in doing so. Phew.
But, as TechRadar notes, the Socialists aren't giving up on the idea - and their next version might be even worse:
The idea itself is not going away: The Socialists put a 0.10-per-gigabyte version in the program they presented this summer, ahead of next year's presidential election.
Politicians absolutely love schemes like this one: they're so focused on sticking it to big tech that they never notice the bill lands on users and smaller services, or that the plan requires ISPs to track which company sent every byte to every customer.