By asahifile 
The French National Assembly adopted amendment I-1358 to the 2027 finance bill on Friday by 11 votes to 10, creating a levy of 0.055 euro on every gigabyte that a content provider delivers to a French internet subscriber. The socialist deputies behind it put the annual yield at 10 billion euros. The traffic statistics published by Arcep, the telecom regulator that would have to certify the base, point to something close to half of that.
What the text actually taxes
The amendment was filed on 9 October by Laurent Lhardit and dozens of Socialist colleagues, struck down in the finance committee the same day, then revived in public session. It passed despite unfavourable opinions from the government and the budget rapporteur general, and it still has to survive the Senate.
Mechanically it is simple. Each emitter of data — a streaming service, a social network, a cloud or CDN operator — owes 0.055 euro multiplied by the volume it sends toward French subscribers. Internet providers count the volumes per emitter without inspecting content or identifying recipients, Arcep and the tax administration supervise the count, and declarations go to the DGFiP each quarter. Traffic served from a content delivery network counts as the sum of the flows leaving that network. A ceiling caps the levy at 15 percent of the emitter’s French turnover or 2 percent of its worldwide turnover, whichever is lower. The amendment names Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai as together accounting for roughly half of the traffic Arcep measures.
Ten billion implies 182 exabytes
Divide the promised revenue by the rate: 10 billion euros divided by 0.055 euro per gigabyte is 181.8 billion gigabytes, or 181.8 exabytes a year. Spread over the 33 million internet subscriptions Arcep counted at the end of 2025, that is 459 gigabytes per line per month.
The only per-line average Arcep publishes for fixed access is for 4G and 5G fixed-wireless boxes: 255 gigabytes per month. The average mobile SIM used 18.3 gigabytes per month in late 2025. And all mobile traffic in France for the whole of 2025 came to about 17 exabytes — a tenth of the volume the 10 billion figure requires, before a single fixed line is counted.
A bottom-up estimate lands near 5.5 billion
Build the same base from the bottom: 33 million lines consuming 255 gigabytes a month is 101 exabytes a year, which at 0.055 euro per gigabyte yields about 5.55 billion euros. On that base the tax costs 14.03 euros per line per month, roughly 38 percent of the 37 euros Arcep says the average household pays for fixed broadband.
Reaching 10 billion on the same per-line usage would require 59.4 million subscriptions — 1.8 times the number that exist. Fibre households probably stream more than the fixed-wireless average, so 101 exabytes may undershoot. But for the average line to generate 459 gigabytes a month, every subscription would need roughly 131 hours of 4K video monthly at seven gigabytes per two-hour film.
The VideoLAN contradiction nobody has priced
The amendment has already produced one direct conflict of numbers. VideoLAN, the French non-profit behind VLC, said the levy would cost it more than a million euros a year. Lhardit replied that the tax is capped and that in VideoLAN’s case it would not apply at all.
A one-million-euro bill implies 18.2 petabytes of traffic to French users a year, about 50 terabytes a day. For the 15 percent ceiling to leave a million-euro bill intact, the emitter would need at least 6.67 million euros of French turnover, since one million divided by 0.15 is 6.67 million. Neither side has published the volume or the revenue figure that would settle which of them is right.
What a volume base rewards
The authors argue the levy is also environmental: charge by the byte and emitters will invest in compression and delivery efficiency. That is true at the margin, but bytes per euro are wildly uneven. A 210-gigabyte game download carries 11.55 euros of tax on a single sale; a two-hour 4K film carries 39 cents; an ad-funded text page carries a fraction of a cent. In practice this is a video, gaming and CDN levy wearing a general-purpose name.
Institutional consequence: internet providers become metering agents whose commercial interests sit on both sides of the base, so every dispute over which flows count — peering, caching, encryption, edge compute — becomes a tax case.
What to watch
- Whether the Senate deletes the amendment outright; several comparable measures died there in previous budgets.
- The impact assessment, if one is published: 10 billion and 5.5 billion cannot both be right.
- Arcep’s measurement method, which has to attribute volumes to emitters without reading content.
- Any pass-through into subscription prices, which the text does not forbid and no operator has ruled out.
Sources: Assemblée nationale, amendment I-1358; La Voix du Nord; Numerama; Arcep, 2025 market observatory. All calculations in this article are our own, from those published figures.