To raise €10 billion for the state treasury, adopt a bandwidth tax.
A socialist amendment to the 2027 Finance Bill supports this principle. The deputies debated it this morning in a public session. And they adopted it, by 11 votes to 10.
The tax targets the “digital data producers.” In other words, content providers. Amount: €0.055 per GB.
With ARCEP estimating data traffic directed to ISPs in France at 200 billion GB per year, the potential yield indeed reaches about €10 billion.
ISPs as technical intermediaries
ISPs would act as intermediaries for data collection. On one hand, the volumes of data flowing to their customers (households and businesses). On the other, the identification of the emitters. The whole would be transmitted quarterly to the DGFiP.
“The majority of this tax would be paid by the major international players in tech and digital,” the amendment’s sponsors note. They cite five (Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Akamai), which account for half of the traffic recorded by ARCEP.
Another argument is ecological. The tax would naturally push to compress and optimize the volumes of data to be transmitted. In any case it would be capped at 15% of revenue generated in France or 2% of total revenue. Specifically to avoid over-penalizing streaming and video games.
The amendment will only stand if the National Assembly adopts the first part of the bill (revenues). Its Finance Committee rejected it on October 23. If the same situation occurs in the chamber, the Government’s original text will be forwarded to the Senate.
