Taxing Big Tech is fair; taxing bytes is France's blunt mistake

Is there a worse way to tax a tech giant than counting its bytes? France's National Assembly just found out how tempting it is. The goal, making global platforms pay their share, is perfectly reasonable. The tool is not.

A narrow vote has not made this a tax yet

On Friday, October 30, deputies adopted an amendment to the 2027 budget setting a levy of €0.055 per gigabyte sent to French internet users, according to Capital. Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit filed it. Its backers hope for €10 billion a year. Budget minister David Amiel puts the yield closer to €5 billion, as Techaeris reports.

Don't pop the champagne or the panic yet. The amendment passed 11 votes to 10, against the government's advice, and it survives only if the revenue part of the budget does. The Senate and the negotiations between chambers can still strip it out. Le Monde notes that the final budget will be largely rewritten anyway.

A tax on volume is not a tax on value

The pitch is that Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai carry about half of French traffic, per Arcep data cited by the deputies. Fine. But as Amiel himself objects, the other half comes from thousands of smaller senders, some of them French, who would carry half the bill. A tax meant to hit giants would, by construction, hit everybody who moves data.

And bytes are a terrible proxy for profit. Techaeris notes that an hour of high-quality music streaming is roughly 150MB, under a cent of tax, while an hour of 4K Netflix costs about 40 cents. Video is nearly the whole bill. A 200GB game download would carry €11 of tax. We think that is the real tell: the levy punishes the heaviest format, not the richest company. A lean, high-margin ad platform could pay little; a modest game studio shipping a big patch could pay a lot.

The cap (15% of French revenue or 2% of global revenue) protects the largest players, and Techaeris points out it does less for everyone else. So the small sender with thin margins probably hits the volume wall first.

The infrastructure excuse doesn't hold, and the cost won't stay put

Techaeris also notes that wholesale transit costs a fraction of a cent per gigabyte, so 5.5 cents is several times the cost of moving the data. This is not a charge for using infrastructure; it is a levy on volume. That matters because it reopens the old net-neutrality argument through the back door: once the state prices traffic by the gigabyte, every distributor of large files, from game publishers to anyone hosting big downloads, could become a target. Whether open-source mirrors would be caught depends on how "digital data producers" gets defined, and the documentation doesn't settle that. That uncertainty is itself the problem.

Then there is the pass-through. When France introduced its 3 percent digital services tax in 2019, Techaeris recalls, Amazon, Google, Apple and Meta all passed costs on to sellers, advertisers or developers. The text says companies pay, not individuals, but iPhoneSoft's guess that Netflix's Standard plan could climb from about €14.99 to €17.25 is a forecast, not a fact. Still, we'd bet on consumers ending up with the invoice.

The authors' other arguments are weaker than they sound. They say counting bytes without reading content is privacy-friendly, and that part holds up. The green claim, that a per-GB charge would push platforms toward better compression, is plausible, but it is a side effect, not a reason to tax. Meanwhile ISPs like Orange, Free, SFR and Bouygues would have to report traffic data to the tax authority, and one outlet already calls the scheme technically unworkable. We'd treat that as a warning, not a verdict.

Tax Big Tech's value, not the weight of the bytes

Making Big Tech pay more is a defensible goal, and the revenue-based route exists: it's clumsy, but it at least measures something closer to a company's economic weight. The gigabyte tax measures something related to how fat a video file is. If the Senate cuts it, that wouldn't be a win for Netflix; it would be a rescue for the rest of the internet. If France wants to tax Big Tech, it should aim at value and revenue, not at the weight of the bytes.