French MPs vote a 5.5-cent-per-gigabyte tax on data that Netflix, Google and other platforms send to French users
France's National Assembly on Friday, 30 October, adopted a new tax of 0.055 euros (5.5 euro cents) per gigabyte of data that content providers such as Netflix, Google, Meta and Amazon send to internet users in France. The Socialist amendment to the 2027 budget passed by 11 votes to 10, against the advice of the government and the budget rapporteur. It is not law yet: the budget still has to clear the rest of the Assembly's first reading and the Senate.
The measure is amendment I-1358 to the 2027 finance bill, tabled by Socialist MP Laurent Lhardit and the Socialists and allies group. It creates a "tax on digital data producers" in the French tax code. It was adopted in a plenary sitting during the first reading of the budget. According to the vote tracker Datan, 35 MPs took part: 11 voted for, 10 against and 14 abstained. The Socialist, Ecologist and Communist-led GDR groups backed it; the Republican Right, Ensemble pour la République and Les Démocrates voted against; Rassemblement National and most La France insoumise MPs present abstained. An identical text had been rejected in the Assembly's finance committee on 9 October, Numerama reported.
Under the text, the tax is 0.055 euros multiplied by the number of gigabytes a company sends to customers of French internet providers. Providers such as Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free would measure the volumes, under the supervision of telecoms regulator Arcep and the public finance directorate (DGFiP), and report them every quarter. The amendment says only the quantity of data is recorded, not its content or destination. When a company uses a content delivery network, the traffic leaving that network counts. The tax is paid by the sender of the data, not by the internet provider, and is capped at 15% of the sender's revenue in France or 2% of its total revenue.
Despite how it was first described on social media, the text is not limited to streaming platforms and social networks and sets no size threshold: it applies to any company sending data to French users, with only the cap to soften it. The amendment's authors cite Arcep figures putting traffic to French internet subscribers at about 200 billion gigabytes a year, half of it from Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai, and expect the tax to raise 10 billion euros a year. Public accounts minister David Amiel put the likely yield at about half that and warned that half the bill would fall on smaller companies, some of them French, Numerama reported.
The amendment's authors say the tax would make global tech firms, which can choose where to book their profits, contribute like businesses rooted in France, and that it would push them to compress data better. Critics expect the cost to reach consumers: Numerama calculated that an hour of 4K Netflix, up to 7 GB, would carry close to 40 euro cents of tax. The vote is not final. The Assembly still has to adopt the first part of the budget, and the Senate can amend or delete the measure during the back-and-forth between the two chambers.