France Votes to Tax the Internet With a Per-Gigabyte Levy on Streaming Giants
France has moved to tax the internet by the gigabyte.
French lawmakers have approved an amendment that would charge companies €0.055, or 5.5 cents, for every gigabyte of data they deliver to users in France.
The levy would fall on the companies sending the data, not on users directly, but the cost could be passed on to subscribers through higher prices.
A razor-thin vote
The amendment passed by 11 votes to 10, with only 35 of the National Assembly's 577 lawmakers present for the vote during the budget process.
The amendment, brought by the Socialist group, would charge data producers €0.055 for every gigabyte they send to users in France.
Supporters say the tax base cannot be relocated offshore, because it is tied to data physically delivered to French households, and that it would be collected using measurements taken by internet service providers.
Supporters also argue the design carries an environmental benefit, since taxing volume would push providers toward better compression and more efficient delivery.
The numbers behind the tax
France's telecom regulator, ARCEP, estimates that data traffic sent to French ISP subscribers amounts to roughly 200 billion gigabytes per year.
At €0.055 per gigabyte, supporters project the tax could raise up to €10 billion a year.
The biggest payers would be the largest platforms. Per the amendment's backers, Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and cloud provider Akamai together account for about half of all data traffic measured by ARCEP in France.
Government opposition and industry pushback
The French government opposed the amendment, warning that it would hit smaller French companies hardest rather than only the US tech giants.
VLC, the French nonprofit behind the widely used open-source media player, has said the tax would cost it more than €1 million a year, despite it not being one of the global platforms the measure is aimed at.
Critics have also questioned whether a per-gigabyte charge penalizes video-heavy services and smaller domestic players that cannot absorb or offshore the cost.
What happens next
The vote does not make the tax law on its own. The amendment sits inside France's budget process, and it must survive the full National Assembly's consideration of the budget and passage in the Senate before it can take effect.
That path is uncertain, given the government has already come out against the measure and the margin in committee was a single vote.
Stocks to watch
If the levy advances, the direct exposure sits with the streaming and platform names that move the most data into France. Watch NFLX and GOOGL, the parent of YouTube, alongside META, AMZN and AKAM.
European regulatory headlines have a history of moving these names, and options flow will show whether traders start pricing in a wider EU push to tax data delivery.
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