A (later?) English article: https://powerupgaming.co.uk/2026/10/31/what-frances-proposed... (My default expectation is terrible quality from sources I don't normally use, but this seems at least decent.) (The amendment explicitly mentions games as a sector with a lot of data relative to revenue.)
Voted with 11 MPs (députés) in favor and 10 MPs against. That's over a total of 577 MPs. This was clearly a garbage vote on a Friday morning just for kicks.
Now there will be a bit of news coverage, some opinion polls and the politics will assess if this is worth blaming tech giants for the current social unrest.
It's baffling how it isn't 100% present, since any law once passed will affect 100% of the population. It isn't like a law only applies to jurisdictions where the MPs were present for the vote.
One of them can have a very bad diarrhea, or go to the UN meeting to protect baby seals or something.
Here we require 50%+ present and to partially approve the law 50%+ of the present. So sniping correctly, a 25% is enough.
There is a weird iteration, when on party ensure 49% of the total of positive votes. Sometimes they have a dubious 3% of the votes of abstention from other parties that is a shame/hidden way to vote in favor. The 48% MP of the other party hide nearby while there is only 49% present, but if the 3% appear then they must rush in and vote against.
49% yes --> not aproved
49% yes + 3% abstention --> aproved
49% yes + 3% abstention + 48% no --> not aproved
I'd prefer 50%+ of the total for everything. (Note that 50% is required for some special topics, so it's not ridiculous to ask it for everything.)
They made a pension plan that relied on people having more kids and not getting jobs outsourced, then they didn't ahve kids and got outsourced.
Then there is the whole "they literally never decolonized out of africa" just to keep the economy going this long and that is unable to be exploited like in the past.
They cut the kid's programs to the bone and the kids told them in the most french way possible that that was bad. Inequality has been worse than 1789 for years now.
France has sky high taxes and yet they run a 5% deficit. Cant cut social programs that are way too generous (in relation to income) so higher taxes it is.
Most of that money is getting sucked up by landlords. If they reduced rent they could reduce pensions by the same amount but it seems like high rent is a sacred cow to them.
Is there some structural reason that they can't reduce rent by developing a lot more housing? Is it purely artificial government rules preventing the construction of new housing — or are there actual constraints in terms of capital, labor, or materials?
How are those two things related, and why don't they just ignore EU regulations if EU regulations are harming their country? The EU has no enforcement mechanism, it's all voluntary like the UN.
There's already rent control in the biggest areas. There's capital gains tax on rental property sold is almost 50% if held less than 20 years. Non-resident landlord tax is similarly high. French landlords still owe 30-45% on income, plus a 17% social charge.
It's not a surprise that if you tax something, the price usually goes up.
then why not have an annual "please help us keep the government running tax" and at least be honest? Why invent taxes on things that don't make sense?
A tax is usually applied to help facilitate maintenance for something you are using. Or to disincentivize "bad" behavior. For example i pay taxes in the US that directly help pay for public schools, the fire department, roads, etc.
How does the french government bear any cost if i download data from a data center? What bad behavior is disincentivezed with this tax?
So why dont we tax air? Everyone is breathing all the time, if the point of a Tax is to raise revenue we should be taxing every breath
Oh yeah you also have to not kill the population economically. What about the citizens who are doing large scale research on datasets? Those are the ones who are going to make billion dollar companies and they wont happen if they are watching the meter all the time because the government has decided to tax thought, so better not think too much!
A massive portion of our lawmakers are absolute clowns too, it's not exclusive to the US.
Note that this amendment to the law was passed with 11 votes for, 10 no... With a national assembly of 577. I have to assume it was voted at night, that's when peak democracy happens.
That still seems like a bad idea. Then you can't look at an individual's voting record to see what they supported. While many follow the party line, there is some variation with parties.
France is spiraling into a debt whirlpool needing to use debt to pay off debt, basically having no good way to resolve the issue without a lot of pain (“austerity”). Any politician with enough foresight to do what needs to be done gets removed, so those that remain are selected for their thick foreheads.
What’s more fun is that while france is teetering on the brink, it’s hardly alone, and it’s collapse will tip the dominoes.
If we don't separate fascism and populist oversimplification from issues and attempt to bridge both sides then the cycle will just repeat.
As evidenced by the fact that Trump achieved basically nothing and has plunged us into the worst case scenario on behalf of Israel and probably Russia - and yet the proposed solutions in Europe are: AfD, FN, Reform - all Zionist and Russian cucks who don't have an answer but know how to point at problems.
I see a few politicians like Bernie _genuinely_ attempt to talk to the other side, _genuinely_ admit that yes some mass migration is used for wage suppression and thats bad. We frame all our political issues in ways that do not engage the other side (both sides guilty of this) and then we wonder why populists sweep.
Which was predicted by some economists from day one.
One economist wrote, before the first Euro even circulated: "The euro will lead to too many public servants in France, too many industries in Germany, too many vacation houses in Spain [1], the default of Spain on its public debt and then the default of Greece on its public debt".
When Greece, not Spain, defaulted on its public debt, that same economist: "I was only wrong about the order of defaults of Greece and Spain".
The Euro, he predicted, would be one of the shortest lived currency in the history of currencies.
His name is Charles Gave and he's gotta be 80 y/o old now. Of course people are going to hate on him and spill all their hatred on him because he's neither a communism nor a socialist.
And then idiots are going to say that "euro is great because I can travel and pay in the same currency everywhere". As if they're own little convenience warranted the disaster that we're heading into because ideologues, not economists, decided to force a currency down the throat of most european citizens.
[1] btw there are many protests in Spain now because "costs of rents are too high" (yeah, no shit: there's a gigantic number of empty houses and apartment in Spain belonging to foreigners, who only come a few weeks per year).
California has some fiscal problems but if any state hits a crisis point it will probably be Illinois first. US states don't issue their own currency and have limited ability to take on debt so even if California is forced to raise taxes and default on obligations that probably won't trigger a broader systemic collapse.
> Any politician with enough foresight to do what needs to be done gets removed, so those that remain are selected for their thick foreheads.
I probably should have quoted this part too. I was replying to the whole comment about the changing winds of politics. The economics is just one of the symptoms.
Austerity is what got France in this mess in the first place + the Euro.
This movie has already happened in Greece.
Greece's former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on the European economic policy during the Euro crisis:
"When I met Christine Lagarde for the first time — she was the managing director of the International Monetary Fund at the time, before she moved over to the presidency of the European Central Bank — she astounded me, because she was extremely sympathetic to my analysis of what had gone wrong and why the austerity programs could not work.
She said, “Of course, Yanis, they cannot work — you’re right.” She actually criticized me from a position to the left of my own thinking because she said that I was being too modest and too moderate in what I was demanding on behalf of my people.
However, she then added immediately, “But Yanis, you have to understand that we have put a lot of political capital into this program, and your career and mine both depend on going along with it.” "
On the Euro: “Look, we created the euro in a terrible way. The architecture was as if we had designed it in order to fail. It was clear from the very beginning. Think about it. We created a central bank for twenty countries. The central bank didn’t have a treasury, and there were twenty treasuries that didn’t have a central bank.”
I kept posting about it here over the years but at officially 57% of the GDP being public spending (and the actual percentage is bigger than that because a great many of the "private" companies that are monopolies are basically owned by state apparatchiks), France is already a planned economy.
And there's only one outcome for planned economies and its misery.
And when socialists succeed in establishing misery, they've guaranteed themselves an endless stream of voters. And they can only drive the country more into the ground. So more misery. So more socialism. So more planned economy.
France "offered" fiber optic to the entire country (at taxpayers' expense) and now that people have big Internet pipes, they're going to implement Bill Gates' old dream [1]: tax every single packet of information.
What's up with France is socialism. That's what up with France.
[1] in a leaked memo when the Internet began to take off, Bill Gates explained he wanted to tax every single network packet (for those who remember).
> A cap on the tax is planned to take into account sectors with a high ratio of data emitted per euro of turnover, such as video on demand or video games.
They could trivially just host it in other EU country s3 bucket, what am I missing? It would be up to Amazon GE/SP/xx to pay the bill (Just the binary the rest could just stay in France if so they want to).
Yes, but that means that any company which previously provided free downloads would have to provide them only against payments, otherwise they would lose a lot of money.
Such a tax would be the end of any kind of free downloads and of any kind of non-profit content providers.
Reading through an English translation of the article, it seems there is a cap?
> There is a cap so that services using a lot of bandwidth but earning slimmer margins are not crushed. The amount charged cannot exceed 15% of revenue earned in France, or 2% of worldwide revenue. Besides raising money, the authors present the tax as ...
How much does the VideoLan foundation make from France, as revenue?
Edit: I think I've figured it out. The hosting services would need to pay, and they get taxed based on their revenue, and they would probably pass the extra cost on to their consumers, which would include non-profits like the VideoLan foundation.
> It feels absurd to punish data heavy companies. What a weird proxy disciminator. Makes so little sense.
This is part of the net-0 narrative and the degrowth movement that's been growing(no pun intended) in Europe. Nevermind that growth in the EU is already pretty low to begin with...
There was a blast of anti-datacenter either propgoanda or just incredibly bad science, a bit before the AI craze, where they took the total amount of internet traffic, the total amount of data center energy usage, then said, well, netflix is x% of bandwidth so it must be x% of energy usage too.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/industries-in-depth/carbon-f...
In the spirit of radical misunderstanding I assume this ridiculous proposition is continuing to be foisted upon people. A "Badhearts Law" (riffing Goodheart's "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") if you will: finding a bad measure to make bad accusations.
(The idea that AI is going to pay a heavy tax or even medium tax for this seems like some super wishful thinking.)
Is this then to counter tax avoidance by companies that conveniently transfer the profits out of the country? "Oh no we made a loss in France so no tax to pay in France because we had to pay our Irish subsidiary €1bn for digital services".
I don't know if this is one of those cases but governments are generally trying to figure out how to avoid such transfers away of tax revenue.
EU and European countries are rent-seeking apparatuses whose only purpose is ensuring the status quo. Italy attempted to tax free cloud storage offered by providers such as Google, etc. to customers along with their own paid storage -- private storage is also, of course, taxed on purchase, for all hardware: from 5 to 30€ depending on capacity and intended use, because the citizen is automatically presumed to store copyrighted material on them.
The state, over time, becomes parasitic. This has always been the case.
Combined with universal suffrage and the welfare state to buy votes it is a recipe for decline and ruin.
The french state is bankrupt like all the other western democracies. They hide their pension obligations well, but that doesn’t change reality.
This system will continue to suck everything it can out of the young and the productive, because those are the incentives. There is no point at which it will stop, short of regime change.
Wait until you hear about Germany, where you have to pay a fee on all data storage media because it's possible that you might use it to copy something. It's awesome.
Edit: I apologize to the French people. I did not intend to disrespect your innovations or appropriate your legislature.
Same in Poland. You pay tax on printers, printer paper, disc burners, writable discs and so on, and in return you may legally make backup copies of the copyrighted works and share them with your close relatives. IANAL, though.
The best part is that this year they've added smartphones, tablets and laptops to the list of taxed devices, which is ridiculous and pure greed. And the minister argued that the manufacturers will bear the increased cost themselves, which just adds insult to injury. She also said that other countries do that already (Germany was the example AFAIR, hehe), but she just conveniently left out the fact that Poland already has one of the highest VAT rates in the EU, so our devices will be even more expensive relative to their base price, than they already are.
The tax percentage is irrelevant without the context of what it pays for.
If you live in a country where you pay $400 in taxes but all healthcare is paid for by the government, you are better off than someone living in a country where they have to pay only $300 in taxes - but an additional $200 for private health insurance just to cover what you get for "free".
Is the quality and accessibility of healthcare in those countries equal? There are very few countries in which all healthcare is paid by the government and private insurance is banned. Most developed countries have a two-tier system where poor people with only the government health plan get reasonable access to essential healthcare services but often can't obtain more advanced treatments, or have to wait in long queues. Affluent people then pay for supplemental private insurance to obtain faster and higher quality services. Healthcare providers typically prioritize patients who have private insurance that pays higher rates.
You should look at government spending as a percentage of GDP instead of tax revenue. Certain governments like printing a lot of money and the effect of it isn't that different from taking that money in as taxes.
Also, I don't know if that is true in this case, but these numbers will often omit state taxes for the US and only like at federal taxes. Ie they leave the US looking better than it is.
The IMF puts the US at 37.92%, but France at 57.17%.
If you graph these values over the 20th century you should become quite worried. It turns out that a lot of our "good times" coincide with a slow but perpetual increase in this number. But this number will have to stop increasing at some point and we're reaching that point.
* Put another way, it is possible to grow out of debt. The US is the only member of the $40 trillion debt club, but is also the only member of the $32 trillion GDP club. Scott Bessent has been talking since before being named Treasury Secretary about 3/3/3. <https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/treasury-secretary-nomi...>
* Put yet another way, if you are so worried about the US, you should be sounding a five-alarm bell for France and Italy, and three alarms for most of the rest of the developed world.
I'm talking about the 20th century being one of constant progress. Life got better and better, which created a feeling of progress and hope. However, this progress happened while we were constantly increasing the share of taxes. Eventually we will reach a point where we simply cannot increase taxes anymore. Will it be possible to have the kind of hope and progress we had over the past century even if our taxes can't keep going up and up? Or will we devolve into trying to "nickel & dime" everything through politics?
And yes, my commentary is about the world, because we are all heading in the same direction on this. This isn't something you can grow an economy out of.
I currently pay $0.005/GB for bandwidth, which works out to a similar amount in Euros. So this tax would constitute a tenfold cost increase to deliver data to France.
even if content providers are paying - it still inhibits consumption as content providers simply pass the cost to the consumer.
imagine netflix vs megaupload. megaupload or any of those or torrents - they could be registered entities or none but they r not gonna pay. consumers will simply get their content from those sites vs the official ones.
show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome as charlie munger said.
The worst part of this is that now everybody who writes comments on Hacker News will violently insist that every company and individual in the world has to pay this tax and that you'll be in big trouble if you don't.
I've already had enough endless discussions with people saying that the US government will jail and fine US individuals on the behalf of France and Germany if they don't put cookie banners on their websites...
In what sense is the internet not P2P already? If we manage to establish a signal between us, we can definitely make an internet connection without any third party.
Far too many people don't realise this. The internet only isn't P2P because of market economies of scale - like how all the bitcoins are (were) in Binance. The underlying tech is still P2P.
There is going to be a problem with everyone trying to register an address block. The internet addressing scheme isn't designed for many tiny networks and you'd have to use sub-blocks of a big block, but then someone owns the big block and gets held liable for the use of the whole block and therefore for the whole P2P system.
It actually works perfectly fine with many tiny networks, as we have been seeing with IPv4 blocks being carved up into increasingly smaller pieces. You might not be able to get a /12, but with enough cash you can for sure scrape together 2^12 discontinuous /24s, and it'll Just Work.
Barely. People keep having problems with their routers running out of RAM, and there are less than 2^24 blocks available which isn't enough for everyone to have one.
the underlying tech of the internet is of course P2P but there's little out there that allows us to actually establish a direct signal between us without needing to go through a bunch of centralized intermediary services. bitchat is one of the few that actually kind of manages it
Huge asymmetries both in bandwidth and capability between up and downstream. A lot of US users are still on DOCSIS, a lot of users worldwide behind CGNAT (less of an issue with IPv6), stateful firewalls for cellular to avoid creating unsolicited radio traffic. A ton of the bandwidth the average person is consuming is from talking to a caching box sitting in the ISP's DC. Basically the network you're connected to is optimized for feeding you lots of data and having you send back ACKs.
I do like the analogy that cowlevel makes with blockchains being P2P but regular centralized tech being built on top of that P2P layer. Similarly on top of the P2P internet, these intermediaries are building something less co-operative and more half-duplex.
I always found it interesting what the direction of the data has been in this dystopia, might not be signficantly interpretable (as in, "capitalism mainly uses the internet to blast propaganda and ads" instead of "capitalism uses the internet to spy on the citizens"), because the up/downstream direction of data will probably be dominated by video, so the direction only tells us which way video is going, and it makes sense that corps want to send videos, but consumers are more apprehensive about sending huge volumes of theirs.
But in general, it does seem to be that as time goes by, the corporations seem to be less interested in receiving messages, as opposed to sending messages. Maybe a decade or two ago virality was this interesting organic phenomenon that emerged and was followed by the companies, nowadays it seems to be more of them controlling what is viral and what is not, preferring to distribute a unified message.
Interestingly a tax on consumer bandwidth would not deter peering and huge volumes of traffic on the backend, so I feel it would greatly deter edge caching, which relies on reducing traffic distance instead of end-user traffic. I'd assume that at least video would be a bit less top-heavy and more indie/personal. That said, that's just video, the rest of the media forms will probably be unaffected by such a tax, 5 cents per GB is only relevant to video.
Historically, P2P networks have needed enforcement of share-and-share-alike if they wanted people to contribute as much as they downloaded. There are plenty of derogatory names for people who only download and never contribute.
But obviously, this is the reality of a consumer Internet. We all want to download and install software, and we want to consume media, watch Netflix/YouTube, and generally read web pages rather than write them, or produce videos or upload massive amounts of content. It's typically been beyond our resources, as consumers, to produce any appreciable amount of uploads that are worth contributing.
However, and this chills me to the bone to think about it, but now AIs have democratized the production of content, and so anyone who can afford a few tokens can absolutely generate mounds of spam, whether it's walls-of-text or fake music or hours of video content that they didn't need to write, produce, or edit. Hollywood can produce mass amounts of crap every year, but salaries are still paid and audiences still pay, in order to say how much they hated every minute.
So if you think about it, the commercial consumer Internet may be at a precipice where, all of a sudden, everyone begins contributing beyond their means, and it's all slop that needs to be gated and throttled and rate-limited. Furthermore, it won't be monetizable or copyrightable; people will just fill up social media storage with streams of consciousness where nobody cares. Nobody would miss it if it were deleted or shadowbanned.
The DOCSIS is a good start; I mean I'm behind 100Mbps/12Mbps nominally, so I should only be able to contribute 1/10th of what I'm consuming, currently. But do we really want a truly P2P Internet, where everyone is just shoveling slop at everyone else? Really?
> the commercial consumer Internet may be at a precipice where, all of a sudden, everyone begins contributing beyond their means, and it's all slop that needs to be gated and throttled and rate-limited.
Reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 2 where the AI is talking about humans getting overloaded with data, and requiring an AI to curate it into information.
This video goes into it, especially around the 13:20 mark:
This sounds ridiculous. What’s the point of such a high tax on a productivity-increasing service? Why tax specific things unless you want to discourage their use?
Does the French state believe that its sole purpose is to extract money from any possible source for the sake of it?
The average French retiree makes more money annually than the average French worker (who is the one paying the retiree). Any attempts to reduce the number or benefits of the former is met with riots. The French state represents the will of the French people, which in the limit, has a single luxury French bag salesman selling to a single rich tourist a bag for $400 b which is then used to pay for that years pensions.
The sole purpose of the French state is to delay the pension time bomb however possible so someone else is in charge and held accountable when it goes off.
As I understand it's mostly because it doesn't matter. It's not a standalone law, it's an amendment to the budget. Budget that has close to 0 chance to pass.
I believe they did the same thing last year. Everyone did their own pet amendments, claimed victories. And then when it was time to vote for the budget with all the amendments, the assembly unanimously voted against, scraping the whole thing.
Thank you for sharing. I saw some outrage discussions on social media concerning this, and it's unfortunate how far people are willing to spin this to feed their narrative.
I mean, I always try to see things through another point of view, but 0.055 euros per GB is just crazy. GTA is estimated to be 210GB, so to download it 1 time it would cost you 11 EUR, that's more than 10% the price of the product. Politicians are completely drifting apart from reality
On the other hand, it may ensure game editors start optimizing their assets. I'm pretty sure you can optimize those 210GB into 21GB just by deleting unused files.
If you're paying €35/month for home internet, consuming 500 GB per month, all of which was from taxable sources, and the tax was indirectly passed on to you, you'd be paying €60/month for internet.
But at the same time the tax is capped at 15% of the providing company's French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue, and realistically speaking, not all companies would pass the tax on to the users, so it could end up being a noticeable but not catastrophic additional expense for both users and companies, if the bill passes at all, that is.
Seems like it massively advantages domestic French companies. If they only operate in France, they pay 2%, while YouTube pays 15%. I imagine there could be games played where a French only subsidiary pays 2% of their global income, or maybe someone sets up a French only CDN that pays the tax.
How are they going to meter the traffic? Trust Netflix to report the numbers? (Pinky promise this is the true number;-)) Or request French ISP to monitor and analyze the traffic to know what went to which server?
Uh, I didn't see that coming. 8Gbps is deployed on most of the territory, that's potentially 5.5 cents/s, or about 200€/hour. Probably 1 or 2 orders of magnitude too high to be painless.
Given that the content providers (CDNs) are targeted, that would incentivize p2p. P2P networks are already employed by Microsoft to distribute updates, for instance.
What about CDNs? The article mention Valve, but their traffic comes from Akamai.
In any case, I would be surprised if this law ends up being adopted.
> I would be surprised if this law ends up being adopted.
It doesnt really matter. The damage is already done.
Macron tried to turn France (unsuccessfully one might say) into a country that is open to tech businesses. This law amongst other things (record tax rates, record deficit, weak economic growth, political instability, riots and much more) is simply another signal that opening a business in France today is just too risky and this will impact future growth for sure.
You have countries that look to the future and invest in it and then you have France.
I agree with most of what you said, but just want to point out that "riots" is much dramatized and overblown by the media. for what was mostly peaceful demonstrations, with a few nefarious actors (thieves, vandals, etc) using the chaos as cover, and in practice not much happened.
Now, in my opinon, the major issue with opening a business (regardless of the country) is that it is costly to do so, even if there are tax and state incentives. It's much easier to create a startup when seed funding is available.
> "riots" is much dramatized and overblown by the media
I don't think I can agree with you on that:
> On Oct. 21, French Economy Minister Roland Lescure said in an interview that the violence and unrest had caused “tens or perhaps hundreds of millions” of euros worth of damage.
Seems like overblown is not exactly the appropriate word here. Not too mention the the loss of reputation which could keep future tourists away from France, the loss of revenue from the shops that have had to close since they did not want to be looted or burned down and finally the loss of trust in the state's ability to maintain order.
> the major issue with opening a business (regardless of the country)
Well it is especially hard in France considering the record tax rates that France is imposing on its citizens. The cost to actually employ someone is high compared to many countries in the OECD.
Furthermore, the inability to reform the state to restore competitiveness won't improve in the near future whoever wins the presidency next year.
This will not help enough to prevent France from being crushed by their debt. This is the beginning of the end for the eurozone. Bookmark this post for later reference.
I asked Claude for some context and while I'm hesitant to simply parrot its claims, they seem reasonable:
This passed late at night with an 11 to 10 vote (the entire assembly is 577 people). Odd amendments like this apparently pass somewhat frequently in similar ways.
Even though it passed, it's likely to be killed by the more right-wing parties when it gets to the senate.
I’m French and left wing. I utterly hate these clowns. Well-meaning people with good intentions and zero subject matter expertise. This is going to achieve either misery, or nothing.
What is not left into having most of the population receiving freebies without any contribution to society? Obviously the goal by doing this is that you can pretty much get the same political ideas elected forever. Just like communists did but france was good enough not to required physical violence to achieve this. Minor a few exceptions like yellow vest protests. However its a legal hell where you can be jailed for an idea that the left doesnt like. Like for instance why isnt there a single left person that criticizes mass immigration of low level labor into a country that has 25% youth unemployement? Because it doesnt serve the system to say that.
apologies for the article in French, but I found no English sources reporting this yet. It is totally ridiculous...
C'est d'un ridicule exquis.
The positive part is that this proposal has no chance of passing the senate at least
A (later?) English article: https://powerupgaming.co.uk/2026/10/31/what-frances-proposed... (My default expectation is terrible quality from sources I don't normally use, but this seems at least decent.) (The amendment explicitly mentions games as a sector with a lot of data relative to revenue.)
Voted with 11 MPs (députés) in favor and 10 MPs against. That's over a total of 577 MPs. This was clearly a garbage vote on a Friday morning just for kicks.
Now there will be a bit of news coverage, some opinion polls and the politics will assess if this is worth blaming tech giants for the current social unrest.
That's strange. Here in Argentina at least half of the MP must be present[1] to get a valid vote and send it to the senate.
[1] Actually, seated in their seats! There is a detector and if they are standing they don't count as present.
It's baffling how it isn't 100% present, since any law once passed will affect 100% of the population. It isn't like a law only applies to jurisdictions where the MPs were present for the vote.
One of them can have a very bad diarrhea, or go to the UN meeting to protect baby seals or something.
Here we require 50%+ present and to partially approve the law 50%+ of the present. So sniping correctly, a 25% is enough.
There is a weird iteration, when on party ensure 49% of the total of positive votes. Sometimes they have a dubious 3% of the votes of abstention from other parties that is a shame/hidden way to vote in favor. The 48% MP of the other party hide nearby while there is only 49% present, but if the 3% appear then they must rush in and vote against.
49% yes --> not aproved
49% yes + 3% abstention --> aproved
49% yes + 3% abstention + 48% no --> not aproved
I'd prefer 50%+ of the total for everything. (Note that 50% is required for some special topics, so it's not ridiculous to ask it for everything.)
So for a download of the newest Call of Duty, you'd need to pay 6.33 EUR? Not for the purchase but the download? What is up with France?
They made a pension plan that relied on people having more kids and not getting jobs outsourced, then they didn't ahve kids and got outsourced.
Then there is the whole "they literally never decolonized out of africa" just to keep the economy going this long and that is unable to be exploited like in the past.
They cut the kid's programs to the bone and the kids told them in the most french way possible that that was bad. Inequality has been worse than 1789 for years now.
France has sky high taxes and yet they run a 5% deficit. Cant cut social programs that are way too generous (in relation to income) so higher taxes it is.
Dont see that working in the long run
Most of that money is getting sucked up by landlords. If they reduced rent they could reduce pensions by the same amount but it seems like high rent is a sacred cow to them.
Is there some structural reason that they can't reduce rent by developing a lot more housing? Is it purely artificial government rules preventing the construction of new housing — or are there actual constraints in terms of capital, labor, or materials?
old people will be upset that their house prices will go down for some reason democracies only care about boomers and ignore everyone else suffering.
EU regulations prevent a lot of housing to be built, especially if you want to also gave a relevant food industry.
Time to build apartments over top of canals and rivers.
As far as I understand, it is mostly about the hydrogen emissions rather than space.
Apartments don't emit much hydrogen. Were you thinking of another gas?
How are those two things related, and why don't they just ignore EU regulations if EU regulations are harming their country? The EU has no enforcement mechanism, it's all voluntary like the UN.
There's already rent control in the biggest areas. There's capital gains tax on rental property sold is almost 50% if held less than 20 years. Non-resident landlord tax is similarly high. French landlords still owe 30-45% on income, plus a 17% social charge.
It's not a surprise that if you tax something, the price usually goes up.
I assume that most homes are owned by companies and ownership of the companies frequently changes hands.
Why not? The point of a tax is to raise revenue
then why not have an annual "please help us keep the government running tax" and at least be honest? Why invent taxes on things that don't make sense?
A tax is usually applied to help facilitate maintenance for something you are using. Or to disincentivize "bad" behavior. For example i pay taxes in the US that directly help pay for public schools, the fire department, roads, etc.
How does the french government bear any cost if i download data from a data center? What bad behavior is disincentivezed with this tax?
Gotta make sure those pensioners are raking in more money per year than the people actually in their prime working years take home...
So why dont we tax air? Everyone is breathing all the time, if the point of a Tax is to raise revenue we should be taxing every breath
Oh yeah you also have to not kill the population economically. What about the citizens who are doing large scale research on datasets? Those are the ones who are going to make billion dollar companies and they wont happen if they are watching the meter all the time because the government has decided to tax thought, so better not think too much!
Stop giving them ideas already, bro. Jeeeeeezzz
Which side of the Laffer Curve are they on?
A massive portion of our lawmakers are absolute clowns too, it's not exclusive to the US.
Note that this amendment to the law was passed with 11 votes for, 10 no... With a national assembly of 577. I have to assume it was voted at night, that's when peak democracy happens.
Votes like that are, imo, entirely against the idea of a (representative) democracy. I wouldn't mind if votes like that were itself illegal.
Sane parliaments have quorums
It’s not uncommon to be vocal about the parties’ vote intent beforehand and coordinate so all 577 don’t have to show up for every single vote.
That still seems like a bad idea. Then you can't look at an individual's voting record to see what they supported. While many follow the party line, there is some variation with parties.
That doesn't seem like a quorum. Is there no quorum requirement for votes in the French Assembly?
France is spiraling into a debt whirlpool needing to use debt to pay off debt, basically having no good way to resolve the issue without a lot of pain (“austerity”). Any politician with enough foresight to do what needs to be done gets removed, so those that remain are selected for their thick foreheads.
What’s more fun is that while france is teetering on the brink, it’s hardly alone, and it’s collapse will tip the dominoes.
Something to look forward to, I guess.
So Europe is about to collapse?
No silly, more 'austerity' where national debt explodes but pretend we're making hard decisions and trying hard to do something about it.
See ~2008 onwards:
https://countryeconomy.com/national-debt/france
https://countryeconomy.com/national-debt/uk
It can be our children's problem !
Nice stats! One wonders why that puny 115% is a problem, where as the US' 125% isn't.
https://countryeconomy.com/national-debt/usa
I don't know. I'm not from the US btw
The US prints the world reserve currency. It can easily, and does hugely, export its inflation to other countries like the ones in Europe.
Anybody talking about "collapse" in the West is selling something, usually fascism as a "solution".
It's not great, but it's not even clearly worse than the situation Greece survived. https://think.ing.com/articles/carsten-intro/
>usually fascism
Be fair, sometimes it's communist revolution.
If we don't separate fascism and populist oversimplification from issues and attempt to bridge both sides then the cycle will just repeat.
As evidenced by the fact that Trump achieved basically nothing and has plunged us into the worst case scenario on behalf of Israel and probably Russia - and yet the proposed solutions in Europe are: AfD, FN, Reform - all Zionist and Russian cucks who don't have an answer but know how to point at problems.
I see a few politicians like Bernie _genuinely_ attempt to talk to the other side, _genuinely_ admit that yes some mass migration is used for wage suppression and thats bad. We frame all our political issues in ways that do not engage the other side (both sides guilty of this) and then we wonder why populists sweep.
Found the bigot we did
No, just France.
It's quite possible the fiscal situation of France will lead to the destruction of the eurozone if they leave.
Which was predicted by some economists from day one.
One economist wrote, before the first Euro even circulated: "The euro will lead to too many public servants in France, too many industries in Germany, too many vacation houses in Spain [1], the default of Spain on its public debt and then the default of Greece on its public debt".
When Greece, not Spain, defaulted on its public debt, that same economist: "I was only wrong about the order of defaults of Greece and Spain".
The Euro, he predicted, would be one of the shortest lived currency in the history of currencies.
His name is Charles Gave and he's gotta be 80 y/o old now. Of course people are going to hate on him and spill all their hatred on him because he's neither a communism nor a socialist.
And then idiots are going to say that "euro is great because I can travel and pay in the same currency everywhere". As if they're own little convenience warranted the disaster that we're heading into because ideologues, not economists, decided to force a currency down the throat of most european citizens.
[1] btw there are many protests in Spain now because "costs of rents are too high" (yeah, no shit: there's a gigantic number of empty houses and apartment in Spain belonging to foreigners, who only come a few weeks per year).
sounds like we should introduce a land tax :)
> What’s more fun is that while france is teetering on the brink, it’s hardly alone, and it’s collapse will tip the dominoes.
California, for example.
California has some fiscal problems but if any state hits a crisis point it will probably be Illinois first. US states don't issue their own currency and have limited ability to take on debt so even if California is forced to raise taxes and default on obligations that probably won't trigger a broader systemic collapse.
> Any politician with enough foresight to do what needs to be done gets removed, so those that remain are selected for their thick foreheads.
I probably should have quoted this part too. I was replying to the whole comment about the changing winds of politics. The economics is just one of the symptoms.
Austerity is not the answer.
Austerity is what got France in this mess in the first place + the Euro.
This movie has already happened in Greece.
Greece's former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on the European economic policy during the Euro crisis:
"When I met Christine Lagarde for the first time — she was the managing director of the International Monetary Fund at the time, before she moved over to the presidency of the European Central Bank — she astounded me, because she was extremely sympathetic to my analysis of what had gone wrong and why the austerity programs could not work.
She said, “Of course, Yanis, they cannot work — you’re right.” She actually criticized me from a position to the left of my own thinking because she said that I was being too modest and too moderate in what I was demanding on behalf of my people.
However, she then added immediately, “But Yanis, you have to understand that we have put a lot of political capital into this program, and your career and mine both depend on going along with it.” "
On the Euro: “Look, we created the euro in a terrible way. The architecture was as if we had designed it in order to fail. It was clear from the very beginning. Think about it. We created a central bank for twenty countries. The central bank didn’t have a treasury, and there were twenty treasuries that didn’t have a central bank.”
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/07/12/jacobins-on-the-le...
> What is up with France?
I kept posting about it here over the years but at officially 57% of the GDP being public spending (and the actual percentage is bigger than that because a great many of the "private" companies that are monopolies are basically owned by state apparatchiks), France is already a planned economy.
And there's only one outcome for planned economies and its misery.
And when socialists succeed in establishing misery, they've guaranteed themselves an endless stream of voters. And they can only drive the country more into the ground. So more misery. So more socialism. So more planned economy.
France "offered" fiber optic to the entire country (at taxpayers' expense) and now that people have big Internet pipes, they're going to implement Bill Gates' old dream [1]: tax every single packet of information.
What's up with France is socialism. That's what up with France.
[1] in a leaked memo when the Internet began to take off, Bill Gates explained he wanted to tax every single network packet (for those who remember).
The amendment says:
> A cap on the tax is planned to take into account sectors with a high ratio of data emitted per euro of turnover, such as video on demand or video games.
https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
It would only be half a eurocent to update Firefox, though.
I don't see the appeal of these modern games.
It’s about to kill VideoLan foundation (VLC):
https://x.com/videolan/status/2116229135919919278?a=5Ua5pSOr...
I don't understand why this law would directly affect VLC. As far as I understand they provide the software, not the content. Can someone explain?
People downloading their software.
get.videolan.org
I wonder it bitorrent will provide a solution here?
Either very, it this tax story is true, it is completely rediculous and signifies complete desparation by France.
They could trivially just host it in other EU country s3 bucket, what am I missing? It would be up to Amazon GE/SP/xx to pay the bill (Just the binary the rest could just stay in France if so they want to).
From another comment here somewhere I understand that it is the content provider who is paying the tax, not the receiver.
it is the content provider who is paying the tax
See "tax incidence". Sales taxes are paid by businesses, and yet.
Yes, but that means that any company which previously provided free downloads would have to provide them only against payments, otherwise they would lose a lot of money.
Such a tax would be the end of any kind of free downloads and of any kind of non-profit content providers.
Reading through an English translation of the article, it seems there is a cap?
> There is a cap so that services using a lot of bandwidth but earning slimmer margins are not crushed. The amount charged cannot exceed 15% of revenue earned in France, or 2% of worldwide revenue. Besides raising money, the authors present the tax as ...
How much does the VideoLan foundation make from France, as revenue?
Edit: I think I've figured it out. The hosting services would need to pay, and they get taxed based on their revenue, and they would probably pass the extra cost on to their consumers, which would include non-profits like the VideoLan foundation.
I wouldn't "kill" anyone though right? They just block French IPs and forget about it?
AFAIK VLC is developed in France so they may hesitate to block their own country.
Oh that sucks, definitely more annoying to separate then. But still I think this is unlikely to kill the project.
They can migrate to a non-France server in no time.
From the translation; to be paid by the content providers, with a cap of 15% of their income in France or 2% of their global income.
Dear Netflix, my startup is Uber but for carrier pigeons. Carrying SD cards! With AI-optimized routing because I gotta mention AI somewhere...
Is the cap the max of either? I assume so. 2% of global income tax would be absurd. Is this tax on data in France, I assume, not globally?
It feels absurd to punish data heavy companies. What a weird proxy disciminator. Makes so little sense.
Also though, perhaps we see YouTube and others not just adopting & making available but pushing AV2 much faster! "YouTube AV2 streams will be available for Web as soon as early 2027." And perhaps resolutions dropping precipitously too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50244283 http://aomedia.org/press%20releases/AOMedia-Rapid-AV2-Adopti...
> It feels absurd to punish data heavy companies. What a weird proxy disciminator. Makes so little sense.
This is part of the net-0 narrative and the degrowth movement that's been growing(no pun intended) in Europe. Nevermind that growth in the EU is already pretty low to begin with...
Why would bandwidth have anything to do with net-zero when it's one of the cleanest industries?
There was a blast of anti-datacenter either propgoanda or just incredibly bad science, a bit before the AI craze, where they took the total amount of internet traffic, the total amount of data center energy usage, then said, well, netflix is x% of bandwidth so it must be x% of energy usage too. https://www.weforum.org/stories/industries-in-depth/carbon-f...
In the spirit of radical misunderstanding I assume this ridiculous proposition is continuing to be foisted upon people. A "Badhearts Law" (riffing Goodheart's "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") if you will: finding a bad measure to make bad accusations.
(The idea that AI is going to pay a heavy tax or even medium tax for this seems like some super wishful thinking.)
because old people don't understand it and don't care, they just want more money for themselves
> From the translation; to be paid by the content providers
Does anyone really believe that said content providers won't pass this to their customers?
The joke of this law is that it further advantages pirates, who don't have to pay this tax.
Avian Intelligence is the next frontier.
Is this then to counter tax avoidance by companies that conveniently transfer the profits out of the country? "Oh no we made a loss in France so no tax to pay in France because we had to pay our Irish subsidiary €1bn for digital services".
I don't know if this is one of those cases but governments are generally trying to figure out how to avoid such transfers away of tax revenue.
i doubt it.
that could be done directly by taxing IP licensing directly
Can they avoid this tax by moving their servers to a neighbouring country?
EU and European countries are rent-seeking apparatuses whose only purpose is ensuring the status quo. Italy attempted to tax free cloud storage offered by providers such as Google, etc. to customers along with their own paid storage -- private storage is also, of course, taxed on purchase, for all hardware: from 5 to 30€ depending on capacity and intended use, because the citizen is automatically presumed to store copyrighted material on them.
The state, over time, becomes parasitic. This has always been the case.
Combined with universal suffrage and the welfare state to buy votes it is a recipe for decline and ruin.
The french state is bankrupt like all the other western democracies. They hide their pension obligations well, but that doesn’t change reality.
This system will continue to suck everything it can out of the young and the productive, because those are the incentives. There is no point at which it will stop, short of regime change.
Are you opposed to universal suffrage? What alternative do you have in mind?
The organizational form that underlies everything that works and is not dysfunctional in basically everything around you.
Wait until you hear about Germany, where you have to pay a fee on all data storage media because it's possible that you might use it to copy something. It's awesome.
Edit: I apologize to the French people. I did not intend to disrespect your innovations or appropriate your legislature.
But France has that too...
Yeah, France still has that in 2026....
Hey we have the same in France! Always up with the good ideas.
Portugal has a similar law. As ridiculous as it gets.
Same in Poland. You pay tax on printers, printer paper, disc burners, writable discs and so on, and in return you may legally make backup copies of the copyrighted works and share them with your close relatives. IANAL, though.
The best part is that this year they've added smartphones, tablets and laptops to the list of taxed devices, which is ridiculous and pure greed. And the minister argued that the manufacturers will bear the increased cost themselves, which just adds insult to injury. She also said that other countries do that already (Germany was the example AFAIR, hehe), but she just conveniently left out the fact that Poland already has one of the highest VAT rates in the EU, so our devices will be even more expensive relative to their base price, than they already are.
Context: French taxes are 43.5% of GDP in 2024, the second highest among OECD countries. <https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/oecd-taxes-share-gdp> US is 25.6%; Germany is 38%; Britain is 34.4%.
The tax percentage is irrelevant without the context of what it pays for.
If you live in a country where you pay $400 in taxes but all healthcare is paid for by the government, you are better off than someone living in a country where they have to pay only $300 in taxes - but an additional $200 for private health insurance just to cover what you get for "free".
Is the quality and accessibility of healthcare in those countries equal? There are very few countries in which all healthcare is paid by the government and private insurance is banned. Most developed countries have a two-tier system where poor people with only the government health plan get reasonable access to essential healthcare services but often can't obtain more advanced treatments, or have to wait in long queues. Affluent people then pay for supplemental private insurance to obtain faster and higher quality services. Healthcare providers typically prioritize patients who have private insurance that pays higher rates.
You should look at government spending as a percentage of GDP instead of tax revenue. Certain governments like printing a lot of money and the effect of it isn't that different from taking that money in as taxes.
Also, I don't know if that is true in this case, but these numbers will often omit state taxes for the US and only like at federal taxes. Ie they leave the US looking better than it is.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
The IMF puts the US at 37.92%, but France at 57.17%.
If you graph these values over the 20th century you should become quite worried. It turns out that a lot of our "good times" coincide with a slow but perpetual increase in this number. But this number will have to stop increasing at some point and we're reaching that point.
> Also, I don't know if that is true in this case, but these numbers will often omit state taxes for the US and only like at federal taxes.
From the article:
>Total tax revenues (federal, state, and local) as a percentage of GDP for OECD countries.
>If you graph these values over the 20th century you should become quite worried.
I agree that US debt is a real issue. But:
* The data indicates that, if necessary, the US has a (lot) more room to raise taxes.
* US GDP grew by 3.4% <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/business/economy/us-econo...> in 3Q2026, beating estimates. French GDP shrank by 0.1% <https://www.france24.com/en/business/20261030-french-economy...> in 3Q2026, worse than estimates.
* Put another way, it is possible to grow out of debt. The US is the only member of the $40 trillion debt club, but is also the only member of the $32 trillion GDP club. Scott Bessent has been talking since before being named Treasury Secretary about 3/3/3. <https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/treasury-secretary-nomi...>
* Put yet another way, if you are so worried about the US, you should be sounding a five-alarm bell for France and Italy, and three alarms for most of the rest of the developed world.
>I agree that US debt is a real issue.
I'm not talking about debt.
I'm talking about the 20th century being one of constant progress. Life got better and better, which created a feeling of progress and hope. However, this progress happened while we were constantly increasing the share of taxes. Eventually we will reach a point where we simply cannot increase taxes anymore. Will it be possible to have the kind of hope and progress we had over the past century even if our taxes can't keep going up and up? Or will we devolve into trying to "nickel & dime" everything through politics?
And yes, my commentary is about the world, because we are all heading in the same direction on this. This isn't something you can grow an economy out of.
This is taxing communication and should not be legal. I don't see how it's different from having to pay for talking to your neighbor.
You also pay taxes on your phone bill, and on stamps, and on the paper you use to write letters.
You also already pay sales tax on your internet service, but that's not what we're discussing here
How is it different, though?
Please tax talking to my neighbour - they won't stop talking!
I currently pay $0.005/GB for bandwidth, which works out to a similar amount in Euros. So this tax would constitute a tenfold cost increase to deliver data to France.
piracy wins again.
even if content providers are paying - it still inhibits consumption as content providers simply pass the cost to the consumer.
imagine netflix vs megaupload. megaupload or any of those or torrents - they could be registered entities or none but they r not gonna pay. consumers will simply get their content from those sites vs the official ones.
show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome as charlie munger said.
Obviously this is bonkers even for the French but just note that this can still be dropped by the senate.
Not saying that this is not a stupid law nonetheless.
If this is real, this is ridiculous. This would make most internet businesses even more unaccessible
The worst part of this is that now everybody who writes comments on Hacker News will violently insist that every company and individual in the world has to pay this tax and that you'll be in big trouble if you don't.
I've already had enough endless discussions with people saying that the US government will jail and fine US individuals on the behalf of France and Germany if they don't put cookie banners on their websites...
We really need to start building out a fully P2P internet.
In what sense is the internet not P2P already? If we manage to establish a signal between us, we can definitely make an internet connection without any third party.
Far too many people don't realise this. The internet only isn't P2P because of market economies of scale - like how all the bitcoins are (were) in Binance. The underlying tech is still P2P.
There is going to be a problem with everyone trying to register an address block. The internet addressing scheme isn't designed for many tiny networks and you'd have to use sub-blocks of a big block, but then someone owns the big block and gets held liable for the use of the whole block and therefore for the whole P2P system.
It actually works perfectly fine with many tiny networks, as we have been seeing with IPv4 blocks being carved up into increasingly smaller pieces. You might not be able to get a /12, but with enough cash you can for sure scrape together 2^12 discontinuous /24s, and it'll Just Work.
Barely. People keep having problems with their routers running out of RAM, and there are less than 2^24 blocks available which isn't enough for everyone to have one.
the underlying tech of the internet is of course P2P but there's little out there that allows us to actually establish a direct signal between us without needing to go through a bunch of centralized intermediary services. bitchat is one of the few that actually kind of manages it
Huge asymmetries both in bandwidth and capability between up and downstream. A lot of US users are still on DOCSIS, a lot of users worldwide behind CGNAT (less of an issue with IPv6), stateful firewalls for cellular to avoid creating unsolicited radio traffic. A ton of the bandwidth the average person is consuming is from talking to a caching box sitting in the ISP's DC. Basically the network you're connected to is optimized for feeding you lots of data and having you send back ACKs.
I do like the analogy that cowlevel makes with blockchains being P2P but regular centralized tech being built on top of that P2P layer. Similarly on top of the P2P internet, these intermediaries are building something less co-operative and more half-duplex.
I always found it interesting what the direction of the data has been in this dystopia, might not be signficantly interpretable (as in, "capitalism mainly uses the internet to blast propaganda and ads" instead of "capitalism uses the internet to spy on the citizens"), because the up/downstream direction of data will probably be dominated by video, so the direction only tells us which way video is going, and it makes sense that corps want to send videos, but consumers are more apprehensive about sending huge volumes of theirs.
But in general, it does seem to be that as time goes by, the corporations seem to be less interested in receiving messages, as opposed to sending messages. Maybe a decade or two ago virality was this interesting organic phenomenon that emerged and was followed by the companies, nowadays it seems to be more of them controlling what is viral and what is not, preferring to distribute a unified message.
Interestingly a tax on consumer bandwidth would not deter peering and huge volumes of traffic on the backend, so I feel it would greatly deter edge caching, which relies on reducing traffic distance instead of end-user traffic. I'd assume that at least video would be a bit less top-heavy and more indie/personal. That said, that's just video, the rest of the media forms will probably be unaffected by such a tax, 5 cents per GB is only relevant to video.
Historically, P2P networks have needed enforcement of share-and-share-alike if they wanted people to contribute as much as they downloaded. There are plenty of derogatory names for people who only download and never contribute.
But obviously, this is the reality of a consumer Internet. We all want to download and install software, and we want to consume media, watch Netflix/YouTube, and generally read web pages rather than write them, or produce videos or upload massive amounts of content. It's typically been beyond our resources, as consumers, to produce any appreciable amount of uploads that are worth contributing.
However, and this chills me to the bone to think about it, but now AIs have democratized the production of content, and so anyone who can afford a few tokens can absolutely generate mounds of spam, whether it's walls-of-text or fake music or hours of video content that they didn't need to write, produce, or edit. Hollywood can produce mass amounts of crap every year, but salaries are still paid and audiences still pay, in order to say how much they hated every minute.
So if you think about it, the commercial consumer Internet may be at a precipice where, all of a sudden, everyone begins contributing beyond their means, and it's all slop that needs to be gated and throttled and rate-limited. Furthermore, it won't be monetizable or copyrightable; people will just fill up social media storage with streams of consciousness where nobody cares. Nobody would miss it if it were deleted or shadowbanned.
The DOCSIS is a good start; I mean I'm behind 100Mbps/12Mbps nominally, so I should only be able to contribute 1/10th of what I'm consuming, currently. But do we really want a truly P2P Internet, where everyone is just shoveling slop at everyone else? Really?
> the commercial consumer Internet may be at a precipice where, all of a sudden, everyone begins contributing beyond their means, and it's all slop that needs to be gated and throttled and rate-limited.
Reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 2 where the AI is talking about humans getting overloaded with data, and requiring an AI to curate it into information.
This video goes into it, especially around the 13:20 mark:
https://youtu.be/jIYBod0ge3Y
Reticulum (for multi medium) and Tor onion sites (for private hosting over legacy IP) and you’re already there.
This sounds ridiculous. What’s the point of such a high tax on a productivity-increasing service? Why tax specific things unless you want to discourage their use?
Does the French state believe that its sole purpose is to extract money from any possible source for the sake of it?
>Does the French state believe that its sole purpose is to extract money from any possible source for the sake of it?
Yes. French taxes are 43.5% of GDP in 2024, the second highest among OECD countries. <https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/oecd-taxes-share-gdp> US is 25.6%; Germany is 38%; Britain is 34.4%; Canada is 34.9%.
The average French retiree makes more money annually than the average French worker (who is the one paying the retiree). Any attempts to reduce the number or benefits of the former is met with riots. The French state represents the will of the French people, which in the limit, has a single luxury French bag salesman selling to a single rich tourist a bag for $400 b which is then used to pay for that years pensions.
The sole purpose of the French state is to delay the pension time bomb however possible so someone else is in charge and held accountable when it goes off.
What's the 11-10 vote? DId everybody go on holidays and leave only 21 members in session?
As I understand it's mostly because it doesn't matter. It's not a standalone law, it's an amendment to the budget. Budget that has close to 0 chance to pass.
I believe they did the same thing last year. Everyone did their own pet amendments, claimed victories. And then when it was time to vote for the budget with all the amendments, the assembly unanimously voted against, scraping the whole thing.
Sounds like you're saying this tax didn't actually pass and won't, and this whole thing is overblown.
Thanks, this should be the top comment. I think literally no-one in this thread bothered to translate or read the article lol.
Thank you for sharing. I saw some outrage discussions on social media concerning this, and it's unfortunate how far people are willing to spin this to feed their narrative.
I mean, I always try to see things through another point of view, but 0.055 euros per GB is just crazy. GTA is estimated to be 210GB, so to download it 1 time it would cost you 11 EUR, that's more than 10% the price of the product. Politicians are completely drifting apart from reality
By the way, why on Earth is GTA 210GB? That's insane.
Textures, voice acting, music, 3d models. Probably in that order.
On the other hand, it may ensure game editors start optimizing their assets. I'm pretty sure you can optimize those 210GB into 21GB just by deleting unused files.
If you're paying €35/month for home internet, consuming 500 GB per month, all of which was from taxable sources, and the tax was indirectly passed on to you, you'd be paying €60/month for internet.
But at the same time the tax is capped at 15% of the providing company's French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue, and realistically speaking, not all companies would pass the tax on to the users, so it could end up being a noticeable but not catastrophic additional expense for both users and companies, if the bill passes at all, that is.
11 votes to 10… there was basically no one to vote for. Stop wasting your time on that, it’s going to get removed next time.
Seems like it massively advantages domestic French companies. If they only operate in France, they pay 2%, while YouTube pays 15%. I imagine there could be games played where a French only subsidiary pays 2% of their global income, or maybe someone sets up a French only CDN that pays the tax.
How are they going to meter the traffic? Trust Netflix to report the numbers? (Pinky promise this is the true number;-)) Or request French ISP to monitor and analyze the traffic to know what went to which server?
They do request ISPs to monitor and report, yes.
Uh, I didn't see that coming. 8Gbps is deployed on most of the territory, that's potentially 5.5 cents/s, or about 200€/hour. Probably 1 or 2 orders of magnitude too high to be painless.
Given that the content providers (CDNs) are targeted, that would incentivize p2p. P2P networks are already employed by Microsoft to distribute updates, for instance.
What about CDNs? The article mention Valve, but their traffic comes from Akamai.
In any case, I would be surprised if this law ends up being adopted.
> I would be surprised if this law ends up being adopted.
It doesnt really matter. The damage is already done.
Macron tried to turn France (unsuccessfully one might say) into a country that is open to tech businesses. This law amongst other things (record tax rates, record deficit, weak economic growth, political instability, riots and much more) is simply another signal that opening a business in France today is just too risky and this will impact future growth for sure.
You have countries that look to the future and invest in it and then you have France.
I agree with most of what you said, but just want to point out that "riots" is much dramatized and overblown by the media. for what was mostly peaceful demonstrations, with a few nefarious actors (thieves, vandals, etc) using the chaos as cover, and in practice not much happened.
Now, in my opinon, the major issue with opening a business (regardless of the country) is that it is costly to do so, even if there are tax and state incentives. It's much easier to create a startup when seed funding is available.
> "riots" is much dramatized and overblown by the media
I don't think I can agree with you on that:
> On Oct. 21, French Economy Minister Roland Lescure said in an interview that the violence and unrest had caused “tens or perhaps hundreds of millions” of euros worth of damage.
Seems like overblown is not exactly the appropriate word here. Not too mention the the loss of reputation which could keep future tourists away from France, the loss of revenue from the shops that have had to close since they did not want to be looted or burned down and finally the loss of trust in the state's ability to maintain order.
> the major issue with opening a business (regardless of the country)
Well it is especially hard in France considering the record tax rates that France is imposing on its citizens. The cost to actually employ someone is high compared to many countries in the OECD.
Furthermore, the inability to reform the state to restore competitiveness won't improve in the near future whoever wins the presidency next year.
This will not help enough to prevent France from being crushed by their debt. This is the beginning of the end for the eurozone. Bookmark this post for later reference.
They want to tax hyperscalers and streaming services, but you have to do it via side channels to not directly confront the US.
As if France doesn’t need even more ways to regulate itself into global irrelevance.
Maybe focus on the riots in the streets and sort that out vs wasting energy on nonsense like this. Just saying.
as these costs usually end up with the consumer, this would effectively tripple my internet bill. so it's a 66% tax
France is URSS without yuri gagarin. Save us from this crazyness of socialite hellhole
That's an exorbitant amount per GB.
I guess at least it's capped somewhat? Is there more background preceding this legislation?
This seems as ridiculous as having 1TB internet caps for residential ISPs in 2026.
its capped to 15% of revenue (not profit) in France, which is laughable...
ok, so if i want to just update the game i already paid, i need to pay again?
This can only be overturned later - makes no sense
Hurray, a new form of regressive taxation.
The upside might be the return of CDs?
Yeah there's going to be a whole USB flash drive economy like in Cuba
And how many CDs is the 210GB mention above for GTA ?
Putting aside whether this is a good idea or not, this rate is like 1,000%. The tax is 10x more than bandwidth itself costs.
Everyone hates the socialist party, episode 3825. It's okay, they're soon just a part of history and the left will be better off without them.
The French state might as well not exist anymore at this point. It's like the last breaths of a dying man
If you are looking for the silliest legislations worldwide you can save time by just looking at France
When we say best in the world at everything, we mean everything (⌐■_■)
That said, we do have the Germans as neighbours who are pretty damn skilled too.
Indiana says hold my beer....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
I asked Claude for some context and while I'm hesitant to simply parrot its claims, they seem reasonable:
This passed late at night with an 11 to 10 vote (the entire assembly is 577 people). Odd amendments like this apparently pass somewhat frequently in similar ways.
Even though it passed, it's likely to be killed by the more right-wing parties when it gets to the senate.
If not stopped, these commies will have us all wearing a fart monitor and taxing us per fart.
why not tax ai instead?
I’m French and left wing. I utterly hate these clowns. Well-meaning people with good intentions and zero subject matter expertise. This is going to achieve either misery, or nothing.
The socialist party hasn't been well-meaning people for a while. I wouldn't even consider them left. Otherwise agree.
Fair. I’m not even sure what they stand for these days. Either way it’s not working
Everyone is left in france beside the minority of people having a job and being net redistributor of wealth to a massive unemployed privileged caste
That’s hyperbolic and not representative of reality
What is not left into having most of the population receiving freebies without any contribution to society? Obviously the goal by doing this is that you can pretty much get the same political ideas elected forever. Just like communists did but france was good enough not to required physical violence to achieve this. Minor a few exceptions like yellow vest protests. However its a legal hell where you can be jailed for an idea that the left doesnt like. Like for instance why isnt there a single left person that criticizes mass immigration of low level labor into a country that has 25% youth unemployement? Because it doesnt serve the system to say that.