€0.055/GB: France Passes Internet Traffic Tax 11 Votes to 10
November 3, 2026 · Frisian News
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
France's National Assembly voted 11 to 10 on October 30 to impose a €0.055-per-gigabyte levy on internet content providers, with only 35 of 577 deputies present and the margin decided by two deputies who pressed the wrong voting key.
Eleven votes to ten. On October 30, 2026, France's National Assembly passed a €0.055-per-gigabyte data levy with just 35 of its 577 deputies in the room, over the explicit objections of both the government and the finance committee's general rapporteur.
Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit filed the amendment, numbered I-1358, as part of the 2027 finance bill. It charges content and application providers €0.055 for each gigabyte delivered to subscribers of French internet providers. The amendment's authors claim it would raise roughly €10 billion a year, a figure derived from an Arcep estimate that about 200 billion gigabytes reach French broadband connections annually.
The majority itself rested on a mistake. Finance Committee chairman Eric Coquerel of La France Insoumise admitted on X on October 31 that he and a fellow LFI deputy had pressed the wrong voting key, according to Brussels Signal. Had the two abstained, as four other LFI members did, the amendment would have fallen nine votes to ten. Rassemblement National, the Assembly's largest group at 121 members, sent ten deputies who all abstained rather than voted no. Had they voted against, the count would have been eleven to twenty.
The government's own figures at the same sitting undercut Lhardit's pitch. Public accounts minister David Amiel told deputies that about half the projected yield, roughly €5 billion by his estimate, would fall on smaller providers, many of them French. Arcep data put average fixed broadband consumption in early 2026 at 267 gigabytes per connection per month, equivalent to a theoretical monthly levy of about €14.70, according to MacGeneration, as reported by Brussels Signal. For a household streaming two high-definition films each evening, the accrued monthly data tax would approach €20, more than the price of a base streaming subscription. A single 150-gigabyte game download would carry a levy of €8.25 before patches and multiplayer updates.
The measure would not stop at Netflix and YouTube. VideoLAN, the French nonprofit behind the VLC media player, said on X the tax would cost it more than €1 million a year, The Next Web reported. Finance committee rapporteur Philippe Juvin of Les Républicains warned that large platforms would pass the cost to advertisers rather than absorb it. Lhardit argued that services such as Facebook and Instagram are free, so users cannot be charged more.
France has tested Washington's patience on digital taxes before. When Paris introduced its 3 per cent digital services tax on turnover in July 2019, the United States threatened retaliatory tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. On June 15 this year, hours before the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, US President Donald Trump threatened 100 per cent tariffs on French wine and champagne unless France scrapped that tax, Brussels Signal reported. A per-byte charge targeting companies that together carry roughly half of French internet traffic would invite a similar response, alongside legal challenges before the European Court of Justice as an unlawful barrier to the EU internal market.
The amendment is unlikely to survive. Deputies vote today, November 3, on the revenue section of the 2027 budget, and no amendment survives if that section falls. The Senate, where centre-right and conservative parties hold a majority, would be expected to reject it. The government retains Article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows it to adopt a budget without a final vote and strip amendments it opposes. The Finance Committee had already rejected an earlier version in early October.
A levy that passed on a misfired keypress, with only 6 per cent of the chamber present, against the government's explicit advice, will need more than a thin Friday sitting to reach anyone's broadband bill.
Published November 3, 2026 · Frisian News