France's gigabyte tax drops out of the 2027 budget: can it return?

What the tax would have done

The amendment, tabled by Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit, would have charged content providers €0.055 per gigabyte sent to French subscribers, capped at 15% of their French revenue or 2% of worldwide revenue. An hour of 4K film on Netflix, which can use up to 7 GB, would have cost the platform close to 40 cents. Its author expected €10 billion a year, based on the 200 billion gigabytes that regulator Arcep says flow to subscribers annually. Akamai, Netflix, Amazon, Google and Meta accounted for 49% of traffic to French users at the end of 2025, but the government argued that half the bill would fall on smaller, often French, providers.

Internet providers would not have paid, but they would have had to measure each sender's volumes and report them quarterly to the tax authority. The French telecoms federation FFT, which represents Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom but not Free, rejects that role. Its director general, Romain Bonenfant, called it a heavy administrative burden amounting to a "big register of all internet flows", and said the tools do not exist, notably for content delivery networks. Free founder Xavier Niel called the deputies who voted for the tax "ignorant incompetents".

Could it come back?

Operators favour another route, now debated in Brussels under the Digital Networks Act: negotiating transport prices directly with large platforms, with an independent arbiter in case of dispute. The money would go to network builders rather than the state budget.

For the tax to return, senators or the government would have to reintroduce it. The Senate examines the budget from 20 November to 8 December, with a final vote on 9 December, followed by a joint committee. The government opposed the amendment, and as of 5 November nobody has said they will revive it. A petition against it had 853 signatures, far short of 100,000.