What a fucking stupid idea.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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It would only be good if it was a tax that would force websites to be simple like the 90s to reduce all the garbage data a website loads nowadays.
Suddenly, ad revenue dries up completely as people pursue every avenue to cut their tax bill.
We can only hope
Please stop reposting this fake news.
This was "passed" by 10 socialists, out of a 577-person council, who held an essentially secret vote to guarantee the proposal was "approved." This is a political trick. No one supports this. It will not pass.
In the U.S. this would be like if the 3 representatives from Wyoming and the Dakotas had a slumber party and the "caucus" decided to push a bill that required all children in the country to read the bible before going to bed, and then everyone on the internet started saying "U.S. lawmakers approve bill to force children to read the bible!!!" There's a ridiculous amount of information being intentionally left out of that headline to get you to click it, and to encourage lazy "I only read the headline" and updoot farmers like the OP to repost it.
Here is an article that actually explains this, not some dried up old internet message board desperate for clicks. https://tech-insider.org/french-lawmakers-per-gigabyte-internet-traffic-tax-11-10-vote-2026/
PROTIP: If something on the internet outrages you or seems completely insane, it's probably fake. Spend 10 seconds in Google before freaking out in comments and being an easily manipulated rube.
Honestly, Thanks so much dude. Im so sick of people twisting information to drive engagement.
It’s pretty much every headline it seems.
Tip accepted as default setting, thank you
France looked at internet connections people already pay for and thought: what if we taxed the contents too? Apparently the only thing that should be unlimited is the government’s appetite for new revenue. And somehow they’re surprised when people suggest the bill will end up with consumers.
"No no no stupid people, we don't tax you, we tax the data". Obviously this government will neeeeeeeever tax the rich
It would be making the companies pay for their delivery of content, so not a direct payment by the customer. Companies play to play for access to French citizens. How the companies deal with that is hugely variable, but think of this as a step towards wealth tax.
Also France desperately needs more revenue as it is nearing a debt crisis on it's own, which might be some of what is behind this.
It's a proposed law... like most laws, it will almost certainly die along the way, or be altered to irrelevance.
Think through this for a hot second about how such a law could affect EU internal trade and complicate external trade. Of course it will die.
Stop hyperventilating.
i mean france has passed similarly draconian taxes before that caused riots.
"Draconian taxes" meanwhile France is in draconian debt.
France will go bankrupt if they dont cut their government spending by a huge amount. But any proposal in that direction causes riots. So instead their government is just driving at full speed towards bankruptcy.
i didn’t say they shouldn’t increase taxes at all. the point is they keep implementing taxes that disproportionately impact lower and middle class people.
But they won't pass a billionaire tax either.
Billionaire Tax isn't even enough.
The problem is that all the boomers are retiring and demographically and economically that's just impossible to keep up with. Their government has the highest debt of Europe, but meanwhile the lowest retiring age of all and a huge bureaucracy. 1 in 3 French people work for the government. It is just not possible, no matter who or how much you tax people.
My point is that it's ridiculous to propose a regressive tax on internet when the zucman tax was voted down earlier this year
Well... ask the socialists that proposed it what their reasoning was...
They aren't socialists, they're members of the center-left neoliberal "parti socialiste".
The solution to the debt crisis is not regressive taxes and austerity, that's what Macron's been doing and it's only gotten worse.
France never passed a law asking me to pay more than I earn
Lemmy's pretty good about getting to the meat of a thing, but other platforms will breathlessly report a proposed law by a freshmen state congressmen as a done deal. Some dude's been in his state's congress for a few months, proposes some bullshit to get his name in the news, and it works every damned time.
That would be kinda insane. It would be $12 just to download gta 6😂
How about just banning sales of GTA 6 and anything Rockstar, or even better, Take-Two as a whole releases?
How about living in reality?
That's painful 🤮
This will just result in more companies blocking France.
Yup, similar thing happened in South Korea with Twitch and Korean ISP's absurd broadband usage fee.
Maybe, but do you drop the 7th largest economy in the world, and entree into others? Not saying it will work, but as a pushback of the wealthy it's an interesting leverage.
French lawmakers seem to enjoy causing riots.
There certainly wont be a way to tanper with this, right? Like nobody would maliciously start to load content from a platform now just to increase their bill.
Aren't platform's loaded contents just ads? Increasing their bill or let my pc download their ads, will be a tough choice.
It's basically an internet shutdown disguised as a tax. If it applied only to GAFAM I would support it, let's get them out of the market
France has approved a proposed tax that aims to tax the amount of internet data per gigabyte sent to French users in the country, with major companies like Google, Netflix, TikTok, and Meta now in the crosshairs. According to minutes released by the National Assembly, members voted 11-10 in support of the motion on October 30 — which now means the new law has been added to the country’s next budget, despite major opposition from the government side and the finance committee rapporteur. The law still has to pass through the Senate for final approval. The latest amendment, introduced by socialist lawmaker Laurent Lhardit, could see content providers pay €0.055 (roughly $0.06) to the government for every gigabyte of content distributed to French users.
So not the end user directly, but the companies who deliver the content. Like a fee to access France's users, pay to play.
Won't pass the Senate, the National Assembly has many more members than just 21
This makes no bloody sense. Either the pipe is in use, or it isn't. The "water" itself is infinite, so long as the device on the other end has electricity. I assume people in France already pay their electric bill.
It's not about paying for the infrastructure. It's about paying their debt collectors.
Couldn't this be abused? What's stopping me from using a VPN node in France and downloading terabytes from google, meta, etc.? But I guess they will start capping traffic to French addresses.
I don’t support doing this legislatively, but there should be a greater incentive to optimize storage size and bandwidth. Broadband has made us far too comfortable with unnecessarily large files and inefficient compression.
frenchy budget is pretty fucked. they do be needing more revenue.
I fear for the day that France goes bankrupt and the EU goes down with them… The Netherlands has been so strict with its budgeting and it would all go to waste thanks to France.
Complaining about money, how Dutch!
At this point I am not even complaining, just purely begging
Air fiber, nodes of wifi that dont follow power regulations. This may birth the next internet?