--- title: France's Gigabyte Tax Is an Election Stunt That Will Not Become Law description: Only 11 of France's 577 lawmakers voted for the €0.055-per-gigabyte tax. Why the government can drop it and why it would be hard to collect. author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-02T11:23:32.844Z updated: 2026-11-02T11:23:32.865Z canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/france-gigabyte-tax-election-stunt image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/france-gigabyte-tax-router.webp categories: Artificial Intelligence content_type: News region: France publication: Sovereign Magazine --- France has not taxed the internet, and the measure behind the headlines will not become law. On 30 October, 11 of the 577 members of France's National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, voted for an amendment to next year's budget that would charge companies such as Netflix and Google €0.055 for every gigabyte of data they send to users in France. Ten voted against, 14 abstained and the other 542 did not take part. The government opposes the tax. The amendment came from the opposition Socialist Party, which is campaigning for France's presidential election in April 2027, and the government can remove it at several points before the budget is final. Even if it stayed in, the tax would be hard to collect and would raise far less than the €10 billion a year its backers claim. ## Only 11 of France's 577 Lawmakers Voted for the Tax The vote was held at 9am on a Friday, and only 35 lawmakers took part. Eleven voted for the amendment and 10 against, so it passed by one vote. Had the 14 who abstained voted against, it would have failed. Online, the vote was reported as if the tax were already law. Unusual Whales, the market data company, posted "BREAKING: France just voted to tax the internet" and headlined its write-up as France approving the tax "in Committee Vote", although the vote took place in the full chamber. Coin Bureau, the crypto media company, told its followers on X that "the craziest law in European history for the internet just got approved". Gadget Review ran the headline "France Approves Proposal for €0.055 Tax per GB of Internet Traffic: RIP Gaming and Streaming" on a story carried by a major finance portal, and its writer noted lower down that "This proposal is not law". All of this is in [the official vote record](https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/scrutins/9336) and [the amendment](https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/AN/1358) on the National Assembly's website. Anyone who checked them could see the tax was nowhere near law. ## The Tax Is a Campaign Promise for France's 2027 Election The idea comes from the Socialist Party's programme for the 2027 presidential election, which proposed a charge of €0.10 per gigabyte in July. Laurent Lhardit, the Socialist lawmaker who wrote the amendment, cut the rate to €0.055 and says the tax would raise €10 billion a year, a useful number for a party in opposition while the government looks for €54 billion in savings. An opposition party loses nothing by proposing amendments like this one. The government has no majority, lawmakers have proposed 3,975 changes to the budget's tax section alone, and most will be rewritten or dropped. A party that wins a vote on one has something to point to in a campaign. On 13 October, 17 days before the vote, the Socialists tried to throw out the entire budget. All 68 Socialist lawmakers signed the gigabyte tax amendment, including former president François Hollande, and five of them voted for it. ## Why the Tax Will Not Pass The vote added the tax to the first draft of the budget. To become law it has to stay in through several more votes in both houses of parliament, and the government can take it out at most of them. The first comes on Tuesday 3 November, when lawmakers vote on the whole tax section of the budget. If they reject it, every change made so far is wiped out, the gigabyte tax included. That is what happened last year. Lawmakers voted to double France's existing tax on large tech companies and to create a new tax on multinationals, then rejected the tax section by 404 votes to 1, and neither measure became law. If the section passes, the government can push the budget through without a final vote, using a constitutional power known as Article 49.3, and choose which changes to keep. It did this for the current budget in January. The Senate, France's upper house, then votes on the budget, and its majority is led by the centre-right Republicans, whose lawmakers in the lower house voted against the tax. If parliament has not finished by 17 December, the government can bring in its own original budget, which does not include the tax. In practice, the tax becomes law only if the government decides to keep it. Its public accounts minister, David Amiel, argued against it in parliament, saying half of it would fall on smaller companies, many of them French. In June President Donald Trump threatened 100% tariffs on countries that tax US tech companies. The Socialists could demand the tax in return for not bringing the government down, as they did with other concessions in January, but no such demand has been reported. ## Why the Tax Would Not Work in Practice Under the amendment, French internet providers such as Orange and Free would count how much data reaches their customers from each company and report the totals to the tax authority every three months. Counting the data is the easy part. The hard part is working out which company sent it. Much of what people in France watch and download arrives through delivery networks such as Akamai and Cloudflare, which carry content for many companies at once. The amendment's authors say those networks need not name their customers, so the bill would go to the delivery network rather than to the company whose content it carried. Foreign companies with no office in France would be sent a bill, and the amendment contains no means of making them pay. There is no lower limit either: VideoLAN, the non-profit that makes the VLC media player, says it would owe more than €1 million a year. > "I can hardly see how a tax could be passed on to users of Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, since those services are free." > — Laurent Lhardit, Socialist lawmaker Opponents pointed out that platforms can pass the cost to advertisers instead, and they have done it before. After France brought in its [3% digital services tax](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/europe-should-tax-american-digital-services) in 2019, Amazon raised fees for French sellers by 3% and Google added a 2% charge for French advertisers. The tax would also raise well under the €10 billion its backers claim. They start from 200 billion gigabytes a year, which at €0.055 comes to €11 billion, but each company's bill is capped at 2% of its global revenue or 15% of its French revenue. For €10 billion to be right, the cap could reduce bills by only about €1 billion in total. Netflix and Akamai, both on the sponsors' own list of the biggest senders, each carry about 12% of French traffic according to Arcep, the French telecoms regulator, or roughly €1.35 billion each at the full rate. Two per cent of their revenue is about $904 million for Netflix and $84 million for Akamai, so on those two companies alone the cap would reduce bills by more than €1.5 billion. ## FAQ **Q: What is the 49.3 law in France?** Under Article 49.3 of the French constitution, the government can pass a budget through the National Assembly without a vote, unless lawmakers respond by bringing the government down in a no-confidence vote. The government chooses which amendments go into the final text, so it could leave the gigabyte tax out. **Q: What is France's digital services tax?** It is a 3% tax, introduced in 2019, on revenue that large tech companies make in France from services such as online advertising and marketplaces. Lawmakers voted to double it in October 2025, but the change never became law, so the rate is still 3%. **Q: Do you pay tax on a Netflix subscription?** Subscribers in France pay VAT on streaming subscriptions. The gigabyte tax would be owed by the companies that send the data, and it is not law.