Eleven votes. That’s all it took to put a per-gigabyte price tag on streaming and search traffic in France. On Friday, October 30, France’s National Assembly adopted an amendment to the 2027 budget that would charge 5.5 euro cents for every gigabyte a company sends to internet subscribers in France. The companies it targets are mostly American.
Before the screenshots start flying, remember this: the France gigabyte tax is not law. It passed one vote, in one chamber, as an amendment.
Not law. Not yet.
The France gigabyte tax won by a single vote
The tally was 11 for, 10 against and 14 abstentions, according to The Next Web. Only about 35 deputies were in the room. A measure that could reshape how streaming gets taxed in Europe won by a single vote, which is thin even by budget-season standards. Other close calls we’ve covered, such as Haiti’s shaky election timeline, have had similarly little room for error.
Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit tabled the amendment with 67 co-signers. The government, represented by minister David Amiel, opposed it. So did the Assembly’s budget rapporteur, Philippe Juvin.
How the per-GB tax would work
The text of amendment I-1358 puts the bill on the sender, not on your internet provider or on you. Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free would measure the traffic. They would then report anonymized quarterly volumes to the tax authority. Only the amount of data counts, not what’s in it.
There is a cap, too. A company’s bill cannot exceed 15% of its French revenue or 2% of its total revenue, as The Next Web reports.
The amendment’s own explanation leans on an estimate from Arcep, France’s telecom regulator. It says about 200 billion gigabytes a year reach French subscribers. Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai account for roughly half of that. The authors project about 10 billion euros a year in revenue from this gigabyte levy. That figure is their number, not an audited one.
Here’s the thing: what would a French data tax do to your bill?
Nobody knows yet, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. Individuals would not owe the tax, and no platform has announced a price change. Still, an internet traffic tax charged per gigabyte regardless of revenue lands hardest on data-heavy services, meaning streaming and big game downloads.
One French outlet ran the math on a four-person household streaming about 200 hours a month. It landed near 366 euros a year. That’s a media estimate, not an official figure. Treat it as a worst-case thought experiment, not a forecast. Pricing fights like this one rarely stay small, as the streaming wars around HBO’s next big franchise show.
It also isn’t only a Big Tech problem. Amiel warned that smaller content providers, many of them French, would pay too. The makers of the VLC media player have said their own bill would top 1 million euros.
The screenshot making the rounds also gets the guest list wrong. It names Netflix, Google and Amazon. The amendment text covers Meta and Akamai, the content-delivery giant, as well.
What happens next for the France gigabyte tax
Plenty can still go wrong for this tax. The amendment can be changed or thrown out during the rest of the Assembly debate. The same goes for the budget’s back-and-forth with the Senate, Europe 1 notes. I couldn’t find firm dates for the remaining votes. I also found no on-record response from Netflix, Google or Amazon.
So, no, France has not “approved a new internet tax” the way the viral posts say. It has approved the idea, barely, in a half-empty chamber. The real fight starts when the full budget goes back for another round, and the companies in the crosshairs can read a count of 11 to 10 as well as anyone. Paris has a way of turning small moments into big ones, as the crowds at the Stade de France proved.
The question now: will the next vote be this close, or will more deputies actually show up?
