The amendment by Socialist MP Laurent Lardet introduces a charge of 5.5 euro cents for every gigabyte of data transmitted to users in France.
The volume of traffic, according to the authors’ plan, would be counted by the internet providers Orange, Free, SFR, and Bouygues Telecom.
As Le Figaro writes, the amendment was adopted by a narrow margin: 11 deputies voted in favor, 10 against, and 14 abstained. Thirty-five of the 577 members of the National Assembly took part in the vote, and the government opposed the initiative.
The authors of the amendment cite data from the French regulator Arcep and estimate annual internet traffic in France at about 200 billion gigabytes.
According to their calculation, about half of this volume comes from five companies — Netflix, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Akamai, which handles the delivery and storage of internet content. The Socialists believe the new tax will increase the contribution of large technology corporations to the budget and will be difficult to avoid because it is tied to the actual volume of data transmitted, not to profit.
Opponents warn that the costs may not fall only on the largest platforms: the general rapporteur of the National Assembly’s finance committee, Philippe Juvin, believes businesses may pass the costs on to advertisers, while the minister for public accounts, David Amiel, said that about half of the possible revenue, that is €5 billion, could come from smaller content providers, including French ones.
Le Figaro also notes that after France introduced a 3% tax on the revenue of large digital companies in 2019, they partially passed the costs on to partners. The fate of the new amendment remains uncertain: it was previously rejected by the finance committee, the government can now demand a revote, and the budget bill must still pass through the Senate. The cabinet can also use Article 49.3 of the Constitution to pass the budget without a standard vote on the full text and exclude the new tax provision.
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