French Lawmakers Voted 11 to 10 to Tax Google, Meta, and Netflix for Every Gigabyte They Send Into France

Eleven French deputies have just put a price on the internet's traffic. In a nearly empty chamber on October 30, they outvoted 10 colleagues to add a tax to the 2027 budget that would charge companies like Google, Meta and Netflix for every gigabyte they deliver to French users.

It is pitched as worth about 10 billion euros a year, or roughly $11.2 billion. It passed despite opposition from the government side and the finance committee's rapporteur. It is not law. The measure still has to survive the rest of the budget process, including the Senate, and it can be amended, weakened or dropped along the way.

Six cents a gigabyte

The amendment comes from Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit and sets the rate at 0.055 euros, about 6 US cents, per gigabyte of content distributed to French users. "This amendment proposes a tax on digital data flows emitted by content providers, to be borne by the providers themselves," Lhardit said.

The explanatory notes name Google, Meta, Netflix, Amazon and Akamai. TikTok and similar platforms could fall in scope depending on how the rules are applied, and game distribution platforms could get caught too. About 200 billion gigabytes pass through French internet providers each year, and about five major companies named in the amendment account for roughly half of it.

That has produced some eye-catching arithmetic. A game download of around 218 GB works out to about 12 euros of theoretical tax for the distributor. Nobody has confirmed a surcharge like that, and the math overstates what the biggest companies would owe, because the bill is capped at 15% of a company's French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue.

Who counts the bytes

The harder question is how any of this would work. Internet providers, including Orange and Free, would have to measure data volumes and identify which company sent them, then submit the figures to the tax administration every quarter under the supervision of telecom regulator Arcep. Content delivery networks would be accounted for as well.

Government minister David Amiel questioned whether traffic could be measured and attributed to providers without complicated monitoring. Opponents are raising privacy concerns about the same machinery.

Lhardit also waves away the obvious fear that the cost lands on consumers. "I fail to see how a tax can be passed on to users of Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok since these services are free," he said.

Free users are not the only place a bill can go, however. Meta announced in March that it would charge advertisers location-based fees from July 1 to offset digital services taxes in countries including France, Italy and Spain.

A new kind of target

Several European countries already tax digital services, but those levies are based on advertising and marketplace revenue. This one goes after traffic instead, charging for the volume of what moves through the pipes regardless of what it earns.

The politics around it are tense on both sides of the Atlantic. Washington has previously described EU penalties on Apple and Meta as "a novel form of economic extortion." Google, Meta and Netflix have not been reported commenting on this vote.

At home, the money matters. France's economy shrank 0.1% last quarter while inflation hit 3.4%, and its finance minister has warned the country is headed for a wall if the budget's turnaround fails. Parliament was scheduled to vote on the budget's first section in early November, with a 10 billion euro idea now sitting inside it on the strength of a single vote.

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