cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/54833264
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. What the new French internet tax says New French Internet Tax law
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. How much money are we talking about?
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.
But that’s not the case. The revenue goes straight into the state budget, and the amendment’s own justification talks about tax fairness between local businesses and digital multinationals, plus the ecological benefit of compressing data.
Why VLC is angry
A gigabyte of open source software counts the same as a gigabyte of Netflix. VideoLAN, the French non-profit behind VLC, posted on X that the tax would cost it over €1 million a year.
Lhardit replied that the cap would protect VideoLAN. He also said he didn’t see how the tax could be passed on to users of Facebook, Instagram or TikTok since those services are free.
VideoLAN didn’t take that well:
You have no idea what you are talking about. What you said about Facebook and Insta and other social networks are not targeted because they are free, means you don't understand the basics of economy. You don't understand the difference between Revenue and Profit. VideoLAN (@videolan), October 30, 2026The cap may limit what a low-revenue non-profit owes. But there is no explicit exemption for associations, free software or free content anywhere in the text. VideoLAN’s €1 million is the possible figure before the cap, and right now nobody can tell the exact figure for certain because of all the ambiguity.
VLC isn’t alone. OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba put his company’s gross exposure at around €70 million a year, and Free’s (Teleccom) Xavier Niel called the authors “ignares incompétents”, roughly “incompetent ignoramuses”. Those are French companies, by the way. Not exactly the US giants this internet tax bill was meant to tame. At the end, the consumer pays the bill
See, a “war on Big Tech” sounds great in a headline, and European governments are fond of laws that squeeze extra money out of American tech companies. But I don’t buy the idea that Netflix will pay them out of their pocket.
Netflix will do what it always does and raise subscription prices. And Facebook is “free” only because advertisers pay for it, which is exactly the revenue versus profit point VideoLAN was making.
So the government gets extra money, Big Tech protects its margins, and you end up paying. Meanwhile, non-profit projects like VLC, which never had a price to raise in the first place, are left wondering how big their bill will be.
Let’s just hope that this doesn’t take the form of law. Because this will set a precedence. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other European countries try their own version. No government will say no to extra tax revenue.
Like GDPR, this has all the ingredients of another mess. If a law is going to tax “internet companies”, it needs to say in black and white which ones. Right now, it doesn’t.
What do you think? A fair way to make Big Tech pay, or a blunt instrument that hits everyone else? Let me know in the comments.
Voted by 11 vs 10, out of a total of 577 MPs. This probably won’t go anywhere because of how the budget is finally done, yet it’s a brilliant example of idiotic policies imagined by incompetent people in a broken system.
Heavily ‘tax’ gathering of personal data instead. Send out lots and lots of fines to companies gathering it.
first quad9, now this? wtf is the french government doing?
Discovering they don’t know anything beyond the 1980’s.
For those who are too lazy to dig into this: it’s effectively a political non-starter, and does not appear to have a remotely serious chance of becoming a French law.
Yeah this is never going to happen.
Hopefully this doesn’t get passed because that’d be nothing to big tech. They wouldn’t even pay out of their own pockets. They would just raise subscription prices to make up for it. This would primarily just affect open source projects and regular consumers.
This tax idea is created by Boomers for sure. It makes no fking sense.
Literal boomers invented Internet.
Metered pricing for internet isn’t new for Europe, its a revivale the late 20th and early 21st century. Back then fast internet was ISDN lines (topping out at 128kps) that charged per minute fees and that for some places those per minute fees changed depending on what time of day.
This was one big difference between USA and European approach to internet charges where USA pricing was by the size of the pipe as a flat fee and you could shove as much data through it as the size allowed with no extra charges.
Spaniard there, we are no French.
You know those washing machines, refrigerators and TVs that sent gigabytes of data without your knowledge? You’ll be getting a tax bill for that.
Internet providers would measure how much data each sender pushes to their customers
But what if my customers are pulling data rather than me sending data?
There is no difference.
It was a joke. Most people don’t know the difference between upload and download or push versus pull.
It’s simply uploaded amount. I guess companies for product download could switch over to BitTorrent protocol, do some initial seeding then stop and let others upload, unless no seeders are available.
How are people downloading vlc “customers”? Doesn’t “customer” imply some exchange - money, or capitalizable data? If you visit a web site, would images and CSS count under þe law?
Seems like it’d be easier to just add a tax on the domestic internet plans rather than try to gather a tax from every recipe site and blog someone visits.
A) it should exempt nonprofits. B) a tax on digital services seems fine - but per GB seems wrong - penalizing speeds and high bandwidth services over low ones doesn’t make sense. France shouldn’t care if someone is watching Netflix in SD or HD - it should be taxing based on cost of the plan. C) for free services, they should tax based on the revenue gained from advertising. That would give a cut of Facebook revenue.
| taxing based on cost of the plan.
That’s exactly what VAT does. Just fucking raise the VAT rate on that particular line of products and stop pretending you care about your citizens.
Vlc sends you the code only and your machine compiles it for install that should make it a smaller download or none at all 😂 not that I think that’s a good idea…
A series of tubes. A big dump truck.
I feel like France has lost the plot under some shady funding from a mega corp.
