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France’s Gigabyte Tax on Netflix, Cloud and Gaming Sparks Outcry
11 votes for, 10 against. On Friday, October 30, 2026, in an almost empty chamber, lawmakers adopted a tax of 0.055 euro per gigabyte sent to internet subscribers in France. VideoLAN, Xavier Niel and OVHcloud have since spoken out, and the measure could be overturned as soon as Tuesday. Here’s what you need to know.
Amendment no. I-1358 to the 2027 finance bill was introduced on October 9 by MP Laurent Lhardit and the Socialistes et apparentés group. It calls for the creation of a tax on digital data producers: content providers would pay based on the volume of data sent to ISP customers, both individuals and businesses.
According to the session transcript, 35 MPs took part in the public vote, and only 21 votes were cast: 11 for, 10 against. All this despite the unfavorable opinion of the finance committee and the government. More importantly, this was a ridiculous vote from the start: the National Assembly has 577 MPs and only 35 took part, or about 6% of the chamber.
Those behind this new tax are relying on an estimate from Arcep: 200 billion gigabytes sent each year to French ISP subscribers, which would amount to 11 billion euros gross at the chosen rate of 0.055 euro per gigabyte sent. Do the math, and you’ll see. And within that data volume, Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai alone account for half of the traffic, notably because the latter is a CDN.
How would this bandwidth tax work?
First, it is important to understand the role of Internet service providers such as Orange or Free. They would not be the ones paying the tax, but they would play a role in billing, under the supervision of Arcep and DGFiP:
- Volume measurement: ISPs measure the amount of data traveling to their customers by identifying the sender, in a consolidated and anonymized way.
- Quarterly reporting: the sender’s identity, its "registration number with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority" and the volume sent are reported to DGFiP, with no inspection of the content or destination of the data.
- CDN case: when a sender uses a content delivery network, the total of the traffic leaving that network is what counts.
The tax is capped at 15% of the revenue generated in France by the sender or 2% of its total revenue, to avoid hurting video on demand and video games. To get a sense of scale, a 100 GB game represents 5.50 euros in tax for the platform sending it, and restoring 1 TB of backup from the cloud would mean 55 euros for the provider.
Reactions from French digital players
Counting data arriving from each network is possible: operators already do this every day to manage their infrastructure. However, this measure may require going further to be accurate and therefore realistic. Minister David Amiel, who opposes the tax proposal, says the system would "require flow sensors, or at the very least measuring traffic at the level of individual receiving devices".
The real challenge is figuring out who owns each gigabyte. The text aims to identify the sender by its number with IANA, the body that coordinates Internet resource allocation. However, that number identifies a network, not a company. When a site goes through a CDN such as Akamai (or Cloudflare), the data arrives with Akamai’s number, not the site’s. It’s a bit like taxing parcels by reading the carrier’s name instead of the sender’s. CDNs will not have to disclose their customers’ identities and will be able to pass on the tax to them, or not. A French SME using a CDN could therefore pay its share without being directly targeted.
That is the government’s argument. "Half of the tax, still amounting to 5 billion euros according to your proposal, would not fall on the large digital companies but on smaller content providers, particularly French ones," said David Amiel. Laurent Lhardit replied with an example: "according to our assessment, its cost for TF1, which broadcasts five channels over the internet, would be between 200,000 and 300,000 euros," he explained.
Following the vote, several French digital players reacted strongly. On X, VideoLAN, the organization behind VLC, says the tax would cost it more than one million euros per year. Laurent Lhardit responded that it was capped and would not apply in its case. Xavier Niel, founder of Free, called the MPs "incompetent ignoramuses", while Octave Klaba, CEO of OVHcloud, estimates the gross bill for his company at around 70 million euros per year before the cap and says the cap is "incoherent."
A tax that is unlikely to make it to the end
This vote remains fragile: one first step has been taken, but there is still a long way to go before this law is adopted. In fact, the amendment will only stand if the Assembly adopts the entire first part of the budget (revenue), which is due to a final vote this Tuesday, November 3, in the afternoon, according to the Assembly agenda.
If the chamber rejects it, all amendments voted on since the start of the debates fall as well, including this one, and the government’s original text is sent to the Senate. The government can also request a second reading to overturn a measure adopted against its advice (which is the case here).
In any event, an 11-to-10 vote should never get this far so easily.
Will consumers have to pay this tax?
The amounts associated with this gigabyte tax are owed by platforms, not subscribers, whose internet bill would not change.
Still, we know how this goes: nothing prevents paid services from passing it on in their prices, and therefore to consumers. During the session, Laurent Lhardit argued that he could hardly see how to pass a tax on to users of free services such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. That argument holds for ad-funded social networks, much less for video on demand, video games or online storage sold by subscription. And we have already seen this with the creation of the digital services tax in 2019, when Amazon, Google and Apple passed the cost on to their customers.
Let’s take an example. A household watching two hours of Netflix per day in HD consumes about 180 GB per month, based on the 3 GB per hour stated by the platform. At the gross rate, that would represent nearly 10 euros in tax per month for Netflix, roughly the size of a subscription. That is where the cap becomes important: for large video distributors like Netflix, it would almost always apply, and the tax would turn into a levy on revenue, up to 15% of what is generated in France. If the platform passed on the full amount, the increase would therefore range from a few percent to around 15% of the subscription price, depending on the cap chosen.
Maybe we should watch video content in 480p instead of 1080p to fight this tax....
