// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
France’s Weird Per-Gigabyte Data Tax Could Cost VLC Over €1 Million a Year!
At least that's what VLC thinks when protesting the new French law.
France's National Assembly has voted in favour of a new "internet tax" that would charge companies for every gigabyte of data they send to users in France.
The idea is to make Netflix, Google, Meta and the rest of Big Tech pay more.
That sounds like a dream come true for many of us who prefer taking ownership of data in our own hands but unfortunately things are not that simple.
The way this law is written, it doesn't stop at Big Tech. Even VLC, a free and open source media player maintained by a non-profit, could end up paying this new tax.
The measure is amendment I-1358 to France's 2027 finance bill, tabled by Laurent Lhardit. It creates a tax on "producers of digital data" at €0.055 (5.5 euro cents) for every gigabyte delivered to subscribers of French internet providers.
Internet providers would measure how much data each sender pushes to their customers, with the collection supervised by telecom regulator Arcep and the tax administration DGFiP. Only the volume is counted, not the content or where it goes.
The amount is capped at 15% of the company's revenue in France or 2% of its total revenue, as per the amendment. Note that it's 15% of French revenue, not of total network traffic. And the text joins the two caps with an "or" without saying which one applies when they differ.
The amendment cites an Arcep estimate of 200 billion GB a year flowing to French internet subscribers. It expects the tax to bring in €10 billion a year. It also names Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Amazon, Netflix and Akamai (cloud server provider) as the senders of about half of that traffic.
You'd think the money goes to the telecom operators who build and maintain the networks. That's the "fair share" argument European telcos have pushed for years.