France's National Assembly voted on Friday to tax the internet by the gigabyte. An amendment to the 2027 budget would charge every company that sends data to French internet subscribers €0.055 per gigabyte, and its Socialist authors
expect it to raise €10 billion a year.
But by Sunday, someone had turned the tax on the party that wrote it.
An internet user put a 44MB PDF from the Socialist Party's website on a server on his own machine, downloaded it in an endless loop and tallied the tax the traffic would generate: 13,109 downloads, 576 gigabytes and €31.70 in under four hours.
GENIUS 🤣🤣🤣
— Éros Brousson (@erosbrousson) November 1, 2026
He created a script to counter the new data tax the French government wants to adopt:
- He downloads a PDF file available on the Socialist Party's website on an infinite loop, which racks up €30 in taxes in 4 hours.
- In theory, if 1,000 people did this, they… https://t.co/7ygFTdgt2o
In the simulation, the counter shows the loop running from a local address, 127.0.0.1, so no traffic reached the party's servers and no internet provider metered a byte. The math matches the amendment's rate, though: 576.4 gigabytes at €0.055 comes to €31.70.
So, the French socialists, and Parliament members just voted a tax, that they don’t understand, which would cost VideoLAN more than 1 million euro per year.
— VideoLAN (@videolan) October 30, 2026
They are probably the most clueless politician on Earth? And they claim they want technological sovereignty…… https://t.co/JX7tW6iJrP
The roll call shows how slim the majority was. Only 35 deputies voted, 11 in favor, 10 against and 14 abstaining, and the amendment was adopted on Oct. 30 on the strength of its 11. National Rally's 10 deputies abstained, and had they voted no, the amendment would have failed 20 to 11. The yes votes came from five Socialists, two members of La France Insoumise, two Greens and two from the Democratic and Republican Left. All 10 votes against came from the center and the right: four from Ensemble pour la République, five from Droite Républicaine and one from Les Démocrates. Four of La France Insoumise's deputies also abstained.
The text was filed Oct. 9 by Socialist Laurent Lhardit and dozens of his colleagues, former President François Hollande among them. It would make the "content provider" that sent the data, not the internet provider, liable for the tax, which it calls a tax on digital data producers. Internet providers would be required to meter every sender's traffic into French homes and businesses under the supervision of the telecom regulator Arcep and the tax administration, and report the totals to the tax authority each quarter. The amendment bars collecting anything about what the data contains or where it goes. When a sender uses a content delivery network, the volume counts as everything leaving that network. The details of the metering would be left to a government decree.
The authors' own explanatory note names the targets. Arcep estimates that 200 billion gigabytes a year flow to French internet subscribers, and the note says Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and the cloud company Akamai account for half of it. At €0.055 a gigabyte, 200 billion gigabytes comes to €11 billion before any cap, a little above the €10 billion the note projects. Liability would be capped at 15% of a sender's French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue, and a foreign group with no French entity would pay by March 30 of the following year on a notice from the tax administration.
Lhardit argued in the chamber that the tax would fall on global platforms whose free services can't pass the cost on to users, and that five big platforms account for half of the flow into subscribers' connections, according to the Assembly's transcript. His note presents the tax as a fix for a digital economy whose taxable profit is "self-declared" and booked wherever the company chooses, set against a French economy whose tax base is physically in the country. It also says the plan has an environmental virtue, because it would push senders to compress their data.
Interestingly - the government and the budget's lead lawmaker both opposed it. Philippe Juvin, the finance committee's general rapporteur, said the tech giants hold a disproportionate market power and warned that they would pass the cost on to advertisers, and he recommended against. Budget minister David Amiel said the scheme would require flow sensors, that about half of the tax, or €5 billion, would land on smaller providers, French ones included, and pointed to the existing digital services tax and the €4.1 billion fine imposed on Google. The finance committee had already turned down the same text earlier this month.
The vote is not yet law. The amendment is one line of the first part of the 2027 budget, which still has to pass the Assembly, and then go to the Senate, whose conservative majority is unlikely to back it, according to TrendingTopics. The government can also strip it out later. Even so, the vote shows how fast the French left is moving from taxing digital profits to taxing the traffic itself, in a country whose debt is already drawing warnings from the ratings agencies.
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