France Votes To Tax Big Tech By The Gigabyte – And Someone Just Bent The Barrel Back
In theory, if 1,000 people did this, they could drain their €16 million budget in 5 months
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.
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.