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France has taken the first step towards charging the internet's biggest companies for every gigabyte of data they send into French homes. On 30 October, the National Assembly voted 11 to 10 in favour of a levy of €0.055 — five and a half euro cents — for each gigabyte delivered to subscribers of French internet providers. The measure is aimed squarely at Big Tech, but the free media player VLC, maintained by a non-profit, says it could owe more than €1 million a year.
What France actually voted for
The measure is amendment I-1358 to France's 2027 finance bill, tabled by Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit. It creates a "tax on digital data producers": the sender of the data pays, not the subscriber and not the internet provider.
The arithmetic is simple. Internet providers would measure how much data each sender pushes to their customers and report the totals, anonymised, every quarter to the tax administration, under the supervision of telecom regulator Arcep. Only the volume is counted, never the content. The charge is capped at 15% of a company's revenue in France, or 2% of its worldwide revenue.
The amendment's authors expect the levy to raise €10 billion a year. That figure rests on Arcep's estimate that around 200 billion gigabytes flow to French internet subscribers each year, with five companies — Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and the content-delivery network Akamai — accounting for about half of it. Meta is one of the companies named, and it is already in the news in France for offering voluntary exits to staff there.
Why even free software is caught
The fiercest reaction has not come from a tech giant, but from a non-profit. VideoLAN, the French association behind the free VLC media player, estimates it would owe more than €1 million a year; OVHcloud, the French cloud provider, puts its own exposure at €23–70 million.
The reason is that the text makes no exceptions — not for small businesses, not for non-profit projects, and not for open-source software. VLC is free and carries no advertising, yet the enormous volumes of data sent when people download the player would still make it liable under the amendment as written. It is the detail that turned a budget amendment into an international story: a tax designed to make Big Tech pay more would also bill the free software millions of people rely on.
It is not law yet
Nothing changes for now: the vote was one step in the first reading of the finance bill, and the text can still be rewritten or removed before the budget is final. Only 35 of the Assembly's 577 deputies took part — 11 in favour, 10 against, 14 abstentions — and the government opposed the amendment. The finance committee had already rejected it earlier in October.
The Senate is the next stage, and the conservative Republicans hold a majority there. The amendment survives only if the Assembly passes the full revenue section of the 2027 budget, and the government and the Senate majority are both counted as opponents. France already has a 3% digital tax from 2019, but taxing data flows themselves would be a first for a major economy.
Why the rest of the world is watching
No platform has announced price changes for French users, and none may need to: the levy, as drafted, falls on the companies sending the data. But that is exactly why other governments will be watching the Senate. If France shows that a country can charge for data by the gigabyte, the idea could travel.
For now, the vote is best read as a warning shot rather than a finished law. The margin was a single vote in a near-empty chamber, and the measure still has to survive a hostile Senate and a government that opposes it. But the idea is now formally on the table in one of Europe's largest economies: that the pipes of the internet, not just the profits flowing through them, can be taxed. The loudest objection came not from a giant, but from a free media player facing a million-euro bill. Read more on the VLC angle at It's FOSS, and on the vote itself at PPC Land.