French Assembly Approves €0.055-Per-GB Data Tax in 11-10 Vote

Q: If France taxes internet traffic instead of profits, could a law aimed at tech giants also hit projects like VLC and other smaller services?

Yes. As drafted, France’s proposed gigabyte tax could hit smaller services and even nonprofit or open-source projects, not just the biggest tech groups. The key reason is that the levy is based on data volume sent to users in France, not on profits, market power, or even whether a service makes much money. If a platform, software project, game distributor, or CDN delivers large amounts of data, it could fall within scope. The amendment names Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai as major targets, but the tax text is broader than that. That is why critics say the measure is a blunt instrument. VideoLAN, the French nonprofit behind VLC, has already warned the tax could cost it more than €1 million a year. Game platforms and software distributors could also face large bills because downloads, updates and re-downloads all generate traffic even when they do not produce new revenue. The proposal does include a cap of 15% of French revenue or 2% of global revenue, intended to prevent extreme burdens. But that may not fully protect low-margin, ad-free, or nonprofit services, and some legal and practical details remain unclear, including how the cap would apply where French revenue is limited. Government opponents have made the same point: while the political target is large foreign tech firms, a significant share of the tax burden could land on smaller providers, including French ones. The measure is also not law yet and could still be amended or removed during the budget process.

3 articles · Updated · Yahoo Finance · Oct 31

An amendment to France’s 2027 finance bill would charge content and data providers €0.055 for every gigabyte delivered to users in France, with the National Assembly approving it by a single vote.
The levy targets companies such as Netflix, Google, Meta, Amazon and game platforms, but includes caps of 15% of French revenue or 2% of global revenue, limiting what large groups would actually owe.
A 218 GB game download would imply about €12 in theoretical tax exposure for the distributor, though that is not a confirmed surcharge for buyers and Rockstar has not confirmed GTA 6’s final file size.
Streaming services face the bigger burden because repeated 4K viewing, updates, reinstalls and cloud traffic generate far more taxable data than one-off game downloads, raising concerns the measure taxes bytes without regard to revenue.