YHK - yet another hacker news clone

France is getting download tax for content providers (€0.055/GB)

82 points bko 2 hours ago 71 comments

ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago | parent

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50308240

comrade1234 1 hour ago | parent

I tried playing the monster mash on YouTube tonight. It played two ads then started the song but the video had a weird ai avatar performing. It played for five seconds then started playing another ad.

I'm just bitching....

bombcar 1 hour ago | parent

I don’t even use ad Block to watch the videos anymore. I simply have a frontier AI download the video to a jellyfin server first for me.

elmer2 1 hour ago | parent

I would riot too.

2001zhaozhao 1 hour ago | parent

The dreaded cloud egress tax, except now it's actually a tax.

benoau 1 hour ago | parent

What an obtuse way to tax these services.

whatever1 1 hour ago | parent

Compression is tax evasion!

dataflow 1 hour ago | parent

Avoidance, not evasion.

ang_cire 1 hour ago | parent

Avoision*

Muromec 1 hour ago | parent

That's not it, it's tax optimization, it's sibling with friends in a political parties. Easy to confuse them, looking almost the same, but it's in fact two separate concepts!

elpocko 1 hour ago | parent

Haha, making better compression algorithms is a detriment to society, I love it. Finally. Getting those bastard HEVC devs behind bars is a lifelong dream of mine.

bombcar 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe it should be argued that it’s a net tax. You download the video to watch it and then you re-upload it so the tax is zero.

Just like if you buy something from the store and then return it you get all of your money back even if you actually used the item.

WarmWash 1 hour ago | parent

Can't wait to only be able to stream 240p

chihuahua 1 hour ago | parent

GTA6 will have a special 8-bit pixel art edition for France.

stephc_int13 1 hour ago | parent

This was a proposal, and it was rejected. Not an actual tax or law.

Sayrus 1 hour ago | parent

Refused a while ago, voted into the 2027 budget (which itself isn't set in stone yet) yesterday: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...

This is what all the recent articles are about. It passed 11 against 10 out of 577 potential votes. The chances this makes it into the actual budget are quite slim and it would be insane if it happened.

LaurensBER 1 hour ago | parent

The fact that this was proposed and voted on is ridiculous enough. In this day and age we need _some_ politicians with basic technical knowledge to help guide society in the right direction.

This just points out how incredibly incompetent everyone involved is about technical matters (I will refrain from making comments about their competency in other fields but I'm afraid that this is not a great sign).

jamie_ca 32 minutes ago | parent

The minutes[1] show there were only 35 voters making those 21 votes. I know it's only a budget amendment, but that's an exceptionally low headcount to be a quorum for anything.

1: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/comptes-rendus/sea...

makizar 1 hour ago | parent

Came here to say this. The forum post is factually incorrect, it would be good to add a note.

With the state of French politics lately, it's very unlikely any budget will be passed any time soon. My take is the proposal is a stunt aimed at generating some attention.

Retr0id 1 hour ago | parent

Wow. That's more than the cost of the storage space you'd be downloading onto.

minraws 1 hour ago | parent

Not if you are using enterprise ssds... but this is some insane profit seeking. I think they should just ask for service providers to pay a share of the local revenues that would be easier to digest than this insanity.

I feel like torrenting is tax evasion now as well in France.

indy 1 hour ago | parent

Reeks of desperation from a group of bureaucrats who are capable of nothing but taxing people

Computer0 1 hour ago | parent

Are you familiar with their debt situation?

_3u10 1 hour ago | parent

Clearly the result of not enough taxes, obviously soon they will have taxed themselves to prosperity.

indy 51 minutes ago | parent

Yes I am, and I doubt this taxation will make a dent, it will just stifle innovation

baal80spam 1 hour ago | parent

> group of bureaucrats who are capable of nothing but taxing people

Welcome to EU!

aucisson_masque 1 hour ago | parent

11 votes to 10… there was basically no one to vote for.

Stop wasting your time on that, it’s going to get removed next time.

jedbrooke 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe this would at least have the silver lining of forcing website operators to not ship 100MB of bloated javascript mess and auto playing video

benoau 1 hour ago | parent

I think it will just cause France to be siloed. Imagine what a child downloads in 5-6 hours a day of mindless garbage, now that is a €20/month habit why would YouTube or TikTok want them anymore. Bingers on streaming services are also putting the providers in an awkward position. In the linked article VLC estimates this will cost them €1m/year so they won't be viable. Steam is on the hook for €3.25m/week that is the equivalent of them losing €11m/week in sales so even they will be lucky to still be profitable in France.

maelito 1 hour ago | parent

This tax is not well thought but we need to tax those companies that evade taxes. Let's be creative and strong.

_3u10 1 hour ago | parent

Evading taxes is criminal in most places I can’t imagine France allows it

behringer 1 hour ago | parent

Taxation is theft. You're morally obligated to evade taxation.

baxtr 1 hour ago | parent

I wonder if this got solved anywhere yet: how do you get politicians that actually want to save money instead of raising taxes or creating new types of taxes?

I understand that it’s way easier and quicker to do the latter instead of saving.

That’s the reason they do it in the first place.

I just wonder if there is a way to incentivize them to save instead. Maybe some country was successful at one point in time.

gruez 1 hour ago | parent

>I wonder if this got solved anywhere yet: how do you get politicians that actually want to save money instead of raising taxes or creating new types of taxes?

???

"I'll lower/won't raise your taxes" is politics 101. The bigger issue is how you prevent politicians from promising goodies and/or lower taxes, funding them both by borrowing.

baxtr 1 hour ago | parent

Sure they promise.

I am talking about what they actually do after they got elected.

conradfr 1 hour ago | parent

In France they don't exist.

old-gregg 1 hour ago | parent

Warren Buffett, I believe, suggested passing a law making every sitting member of Congress ineligible for reelection whenever the federal deficit exceeds 3%

I suspect he suggested 3% because of the yearly GDP growth at the time, but I say make it 0%. Politicians shouldn't have the authority of indebting future generations.

nitwit005 1 hour ago | parent

Then you might be incentivized to deliberately go into debt strategically, and remove the sitting opposition if you think you'll lose the next election.

davideous 59 minutes ago | parent

My state (Indiana) has a constitutional clause that prohibits borrowing except in the case of an unexpected shortfall in revenue or war. This means the state may not pass a deficit budget except in time of war. It had worked out well for the state.

erickhill 16 minutes ago | parent

Do you mean a war as formally declared by Congress, or perpetual wars that occur regardless?

croes 56 minutes ago | parent

That’s how you get rotting infrastructure and a bad education system.

That’s also indebting future generations, it just doesn’t show in the deficit.

Not to mention without state‘s debt a lot of people lose interest rates on their savings.

jml7c5 47 minutes ago | parent

Putting deficits below GDP growth can also be a roundabout way of slightly impoverishing future generations. A country that engages in countercyclical spending and growth via (less-than-GDP) deficits outperforms one that runs zero debt, and future generations end up wealthier.

ogogmad 12 minutes ago | parent

What if people end up becoming increasingly dependent on their government spending beyond its means, so that they end up suffering more harm once the deficit is reduced than if it were never raised in the first place, leading to the debt surging up until the state collapses?

Also, you can't guarantee that you'll be able to make future payments.

yodsanklai 1 hour ago | parent

> how do you get politicians that actually want to save money

What makes you think that they don't save money? looking at the state of public services and infrastructures (at least in my country), I can see how we don't spend as much as we should, which I suppose qualifies as saving. Budgets for education, justice, police, healthcare often decrease too. Also seeing how many billionaires we have, it's also obvious to me that we actually need more tax, not less.

tonfreed 47 minutes ago | parent

Somehow I'm paying more tax and getting worse services. I'm getting pretty sick of it, and the only way it's going to change is a reform of the public service.

I'd want to see quarterly budgets and funding vs yearly, penalties for any department executives that spend just so they use their entire budgets, and efficiency dividends implemented for any department that has been caught spending on pointless crap. We have the tech to move fast in ensuring funds are being used responsibly.

bko 1 hour ago | parent

Yes but you're not going to like the solution.

Basically make a pledge to never raise taxes. It was called norquist pledge. Signers promise to oppose any and all efforts to increase marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses.

Questionable whether this actually constrained spending. Ideally would be paired w balance budget amendment

croes 59 minutes ago | parent

The problem is they tax and save upon the wrong people which leads to wealthy transfer to the upper 1% which leads to economic problems. They try to fix that by taxing and saving upon the wrong people even more.

tchalla 16 minutes ago | parent

It’s almost as if this is now done on purpose.

m0llusk 55 minutes ago | parent

Under Clinton the "PAYGO" rules enforced that all spending had to be covered by cuts or new taxes. This caused a lot of aggressive review and limited eagerness to spend.

kevin_thibedeau 51 minutes ago | parent

> Maybe some country was successful at one point in time.

It worked for France after the invention of the guillotine.

tormeh 45 minutes ago | parent

The easiest place to save is in entitlements. Saving there is unfortunately a really good way to avoid reelection. If you want to save money, get a better demography. That's impossible, but not more impossible than cutting benefits.

WalterBright 16 minutes ago | parent

We could return to a sound money system, which is what the US had before 1914. (The Federal Reserve Act in 1914 switched us to a fiat money system.)

loeg 1 hour ago | parent

Europe never beating the allegations...

natas 1 hour ago | parent

This will severely undermine technological innovation and the development of new technologies.

zerozerotwo 1 hour ago | parent

This is going to well with the digital only ps5

majora2007 1 hour ago | parent

I actually like the idea of this, but with some restrictions (and wouldn't mind seeing it in the US). Yes, I know the costs are passed thru to consumers.

Here's my thinking:

1. Limit who is charged based on how much bandwidth they consume / month. If it's over 1TB, the tax goes into affect. This helps small businesses.

2. If (1) can't work, we can do it based on income from French users above X / month.

3. Tax income must go towards infrastructure projects: Parks & Recs, Fiber buildouts, etc.

shoo 1 hour ago | parent

If the US were to follow this excellent idea to raise revenue, it could completely solve the federal budget deficit.

A modest download tax of USD $2.07 per GB suffices.

Estimate:

  - 134 million households
  - approx 80% of households subscribe to home broadband
  - approx 750 GB download per month per household
  - $2 trillion annual deficit
  - assumes no change in household behaviour in response to the new tax

dlahoda 1 hour ago | parent

instead of taxing some people to cover bad behaviour of others, may be should just allow musk doge?

derektank 1 hour ago | parent

>assumes no change in household behaviour in response to the new tax

Lol, my behavior would change a lot if I was paying $2 per gig, my god

jedbrooke 1 hour ago | parent

I used to pay $5 a gig for mobile data, I used about 100MB per month. Now I have unlimited and I use >5GB

abdullahkhalids 1 hour ago | parent

The stated reason is that physical business, when they use the country's infrastructure pay tax to contribute to the upkeep. But presumably, internet businesses, especially those based outside the country use the infrastructure but do not pay for the upkeep. This tax is supposed to address this issue.

While the solution might not be optimal, how valid is the underlying problem? Can someone make genuine steelman arguments?

wmf 1 hour ago | parent

AFAIK the Internet in France is private infrastructure that has already been paid for by its customers.

malloryerik 1 hour ago | parent

Not simply EUR 5.5 cents per GB! The tax is limited to 15% of revenue from data transmission in France, or 2% of total global revenues.

So Netflix pays max 15% of streaming revenue in France. If you and I start a streaming service only in France, we pay a max 2% of streaming revenue in France (because that's the only place where we stream). So there's potentially a protectionist element. But note that you and I could do our France-only service from anywhere and still be capped at 2%, according to the law as I understand it (not a lawyer).

> « La taxe sur les producteurs de données numériques fait l’objet d’un plafonnement correspondant au maximum à 15 % du chiffre d’affaires réalisé en France par l’émetteur ou à 2 % de son chiffre d’affaires total. [1]

"The tax on digital service producers has a ceiling that corresponds to a maximum of 15% of France-based revenue by the transmitter or 2% of its total revenue (my translation)."

[1] https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...

ThrustVectoring 22 minutes ago | parent

What's to stop Netflix from spinning out a Netflix France for the sole purpose of having all French revenue in a single corporate entity subject to the 2% of total global revenues rule?

jonathanstrange 1 hour ago | parent

Who had this idea? This would have the effect that paid services get more expensive and free services get lower quality, stop working, or become illegal.

Putting that aside, I'd be interested in how they'd want to measure this when in practice network traffic is delivered over all kinds of CDNs and rented servers from who knows where. The technicalities of determining who would have to pay seem very non-trivial to me.

bko 52 minutes ago | parent

It's in incredible how hostile this tax is but I have to give them credit. They just see something that's productive and valuable and they just see money they can extort from people.

No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology. Or tax on stock buybacks which have questionable value in society. Or carbon tax.

Just see something people do and tax it.

somat 20 minutes ago | parent

On the subject of gasoline taxes, they are getting increasingly worried about lost revenue from the uptake of electric cars. It is going to be a distance tax I am sure, but what would make sense is to just give the department of transportation the electric tax already existing.

vondur 50 minutes ago | parent

France is in pretty bad financial shape, so they are going to be looking at getting money wherever they can.

amelius 38 minutes ago | parent

How to get rioting people off the streets and into their homes watching Netflix ...

Let's see ...

Content tax?