Yet another Hacker News

French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax

55 points nick486 1 hour ago 55 comments

nick486 1 hour ago | parent

apologies for the article in French, but I found no English sources reporting this yet. It is totally ridiculous...

motbus3 1 hour ago | parent

If this is real, this is ridiculous. This would make most internet businesses even more unaccessible

zomtorg 1 hour ago | parent

The upside might be the return of CDs?

timcobb 38 minutes ago | parent

Yeah there's going to be a whole USB flash drive economy like in Cuba

well_ackshually 1 hour ago | parent

Everyone hates the socialist party, episode 3825. It's okay, they're soon just a part of history and the left will be better off without them.

cmiles8 59 minutes ago | parent

As if France doesn’t need even more ways to regulate itself into global irrelevance.

Maybe focus on the riots in the streets and sort that out vs wasting energy on nonsense like this. Just saying.

antisthenes 58 minutes ago | parent

That's an exorbitant amount per GB.

I guess at least it's capped somewhat? Is there more background preceding this legislation?

This seems as ridiculous as having 1TB internet caps for residential ISPs in 2026.

nick486 55 minutes ago | parent

its capped to 15% of revenue (not profit) in France, which is laughable...

netsharc 57 minutes ago | parent

From the translation; to be paid by the content providers, with a cap of 15% of their income in France or 2% of their global income.

Dear Netflix, my startup is Uber but for carrier pigeons. Carrying SD cards! With AI-optimized routing because I gotta mention AI somewhere...

jauntywundrkind 56 minutes ago | parent

Is the cap the max of either? I assume so. 2% of global income tax would be absurd. Is this tax on data in France, I assume, not globally?

It feels absurd to punish data heavy companies. What a weird proxy disciminator. Makes so little sense.

Also though, perhaps we see YouTube and others not just adopting & making available but pushing AV2 much faster! "YouTube AV2 streams will be available for Web as soon as early 2027." And perhaps resolutions dropping precipitously too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50244283 http://aomedia.org/press%20releases/AOMedia-Rapid-AV2-Adopti...

rdm_blackhole 50 minutes ago | parent

> It feels absurd to punish data heavy companies. What a weird proxy disciminator. Makes so little sense.

This is part of the net-0 narrative and the degrowth movement that's been growing(no pun intended) in Europe. Nevermind that growth in the EU is already pretty low to begin with...

baal80spam 56 minutes ago | parent

> From the translation; to be paid by the content providers

Does anyone really believe that said content providers won't pass this to their customers?

eastbound 41 minutes ago | parent

The joke of this law is that it further advantages pirates, who don't have to pay this tax.

samfriedman 27 minutes ago | parent

Avian Intelligence is the next frontier.

Youden 55 minutes ago | parent

So for a download of the newest Call of Duty, you'd need to pay 6.33 EUR? Not for the purchase but the download? What is up with France?

downrightmike 48 minutes ago | parent

They made a pension plan that relied on people having more kids and not getting jobs outsourced, then they didn't ahve kids and got outsourced.

Then there is the whole "they literally never decolonized out of africa" just to keep the economy going this long and that is unable to be exploited like in the past.

They cut the kid's programs to the bone and the kids told them in the most french way possible that that was bad. Inequality has been worse than 1789 for years now.

greyw 40 minutes ago | parent

France has sky high taxes and yet they run a 5% deficit. Cant cut social programs that are way too generous (in relation to income) so higher taxes it is.

Dont see that working in the long run

sidewndr46 46 minutes ago | parent

Why not? The point of a tax is to raise revenue

lurking_swe 42 minutes ago | parent

then why not have an annual "please help us keep the government running tax" and at least be honest? Why invent taxes on things that don't make sense?

A tax is usually applied to help facilitate maintenance for something you are using. Or to disincentivize "bad" behavior. For example i pay taxes in the US that directly help pay for public schools, the fire department, roads, etc.

How does the french government bear and cost if i download data from a data center? What bad behavior is disincentivezed with this tax?

epistasis 40 minutes ago | parent

Gotta make sure those pensioners are raking in more money per year than the people actually in their prime working years take home...

malux85 40 minutes ago | parent

So why dont we tax air? Everyone is breathing all the time, if the point of a Tax is to raise revenue we should be taxing every breath

Oh yeah you also have to not kill the population economically. What about the citizens who are doing large scale research on datasets? Those are the ones who are going to make billion dollar companies and they wont happen if they are watching the meter all the time because the government has decided to tax thought, so better not think too much!

well_ackshually 37 minutes ago | parent

A massive portion of our lawmakers are absolute clowns too, it's not exclusive to the US.

Note that this amendment to the law was passed with 11 votes for, 10 no... With a national assembly of 577. I have to assume it was voted at night, that's when peak democracy happens.

Modified3019 17 minutes ago | parent

France is spiraling into a debt whirlpool needing to use debt to pay off debt, basically having no good way to resolve the issue without a lot of pain (“austerity”). Any politician with enough foresight to do what needs to be done gets removed, so those that remain are selected for their thick foreheads.

What’s more fun is that while france is teetering on the brink, it’s hardly alone, and it’s collapse will tip the dominoes.

Something to look forward to, I guess.

ObnoxiousProxy 53 minutes ago | parent

We really need to start building out a fully P2P internet.

TZubiri 48 minutes ago | parent

In what sense is the internet not P2P already? If we manage to establish a signal between us, we can definitely make an internet connection without any third party.

iamnothere 44 minutes ago | parent

Reticulum (for multi medium) and Tor onion sites (for private hosting over legacy IP) and you’re already there.

rdm_blackhole 52 minutes ago | parent

Obviously this is bonkers even for the French but just note that this can still be dropped by the senate.

Not saying that this is not a stupid law nonetheless.

miohtama 49 minutes ago | parent

It’s about to kill VideoLan foundation (VLC):

https://x.com/videolan/status/2116229135919919278?a=5Ua5pSOr...

quicon 27 minutes ago | parent

I don't understand why this law would directly affect VLC. As far as I understand they provide the software, not the content. Can someone explain?

0x_rs 23 minutes ago | parent

People downloading their software.

get.videolan.org

antisthenes 16 minutes ago | parent

VLC is like a 30MB download last I checked, so not the end of the world, but still annoying to pay in addition to the hosting you already pay.

I wonder if you host the files on a US server instead, and people from France download it, who ends up paying for the traffic?

This legislation seems so ill-conceived, it would almost rival UK's debacle trying to fine 4chan for some non-compliance.

hommelix 47 minutes ago | parent

How are they going to meter the traffic? Trust Netflix to report the numbers? (Pinky promise this is the true number;-)) Or request French ISP to monitor and analyze the traffic to know what went to which server?

well_ackshually 43 minutes ago | parent

They do request ISPs to monitor and report, yes.

0x_rs 47 minutes ago | parent

EU and European countries are rent-seeking apparatuses whose only purpose is ensuring the status quo. Italy attempted to tax free cloud storage offered by providers such as Google, etc. to customers along with their own paid storage -- private storage is also, of course, taxed on purchase, for all hardware: from 5 to 30€ depending on capacity and intended use, because the citizen is automatically presumed to store copyrighted material on them.

MrBuddyCasino 45 minutes ago | parent

The state, over time, becomes parasitic. This has always been the case.

Combined with universal suffrage and the welfare state to buy votes it is a recipe for decline and ruin.

The french state is bankrupt like all the other western democracies. They hide their pension obligations well, but that doesn’t change reality.

This system will continue to suck everything it can out of the young and the productive, because those are the incentives. There is no point at which it will stop, short of regime change.

elpocko 42 minutes ago | parent

Wait until you hear about Germany, where you have to pay a fee on all data storage media because it's possible that you might use it to copy something. It's awesome.

Edit: I apologize to the French people. I did not intend to disrespect your innovations.

pingou 37 minutes ago | parent

But France has that too...

rdm_blackhole 35 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, France still has that in 2026....

tuetuopay 33 minutes ago | parent

Hey we have the same in France! Always up with the good ideas.

MayeulC 45 minutes ago | parent

Uh, I didn't see that coming. 8Gbps is deployed on most of the territory, that's potentially 5.5 cents/s, or about 200€/hour. Probably 1 or 2 orders of magnitude too high to be painless.

Given that the content providers (CDNs) are targeted, that would incentivize p2p. P2P networks are already employed by Microsoft to distribute updates, for instance.

What about CDNs? The article mention Valve, but their traffic comes from Akamai.

In any case, I would be surprised if this law ends up being adopted.

rdm_blackhole 37 minutes ago | parent

> I would be surprised if this law ends up being adopted.

It doesnt really matter. The damage is already done.

Macron tried to turn France (unsuccessfully one might say) into a country that is open to tech businesses. This law amongst other things (record tax rates, record deficit, weak economic growth, political instability, riots and much more) is simply another signal that opening a business in France today is just too risky and this will impact future growth for sure.

You have countries that look to the future and invest in it and then you have France.

elikoga 44 minutes ago | parent

The French state might as well not exist anymore at this point. It's like the last breaths of a dying man

Youden 43 minutes ago | parent

I asked Claude for some context and while I'm hesitant to simply parrot its claims, they seem reasonable:

This passed late at night with an 11 to 10 vote (the entire assembly is 577 people). Odd amendments like this apparently pass somewhat frequently in similar ways.

Even though it passed, it's likely to be killed by the more right-wing parties when it gets to the senate.

carlosjobim 41 minutes ago | parent

The worst part of this is that now everybody who writes comments on Hacker News will violently insist that every company and individual in the world has to pay this tax and that you'll be in big trouble if you don't.

I've already had enough endless discussions with people saying that the US government will jail and fine US individuals on the behalf of France and Germany if they don't put cookie banners on their websites...

johen8 41 minutes ago | parent

I mean, I always try to see things through another point of view, but 0.055 euros per GB is just crazy. GTA is estimated to be 210GB, so to download it 1 time it would cost you 11 EUR, that's more than 10% the price of the product. Politicians are completely drifting apart from reality

sgt 40 minutes ago | parent

By the way, why on Earth is GTA 210GB? That's insane.

xyzsparetimexyz 39 minutes ago | parent

Textures, voice acting, music, 3d models. Probably in that order.

eastbound 39 minutes ago | parent

On the other hand, it may ensure game editors start optimizing their assets. I'm pretty sure you can optimize those 210GB into 21GB just by deleting unused files.

dinkblam 38 minutes ago | parent

If you are looking for the silliest legislations worldwide you can save time by just looking at France

well_ackshually 35 minutes ago | parent

When we say best in the world at everything, we mean everything (⌐■_■)

That said, we do have the Germans as neighbours who are pretty damn skilled too.

maxdo 38 minutes ago | parent

ok, so if i want to just update the game i already paid, i need to pay again?

lousken 35 minutes ago | parent

why not tax ai instead?

joegibbs 35 minutes ago | parent

This sounds ridiculous. What’s the point of such a high tax on a productivity-increasing service? Why tax specific things unless you want to discourage their use?

Does the French state believe that its sole purpose is to extract money from any possible source for the sake of it?

dzonga 34 minutes ago | parent

piracy wins again.

even if content providers are paying - it still inhibits consumption as content providers simply pass the cost to the consumer.

imagine netflix vs megaupload. megaupload or any of those or torrents - they could be registered entities or none but they r not gonna pay. consumers will simply get their content from those sites vs the official ones.

show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome as charlie munger said.

tgv 31 minutes ago | parent

What's the 11-10 vote? DId everybody go on holidays and leave only 21 members in session?