What a fucking stupid idea.

Please stop reposting this fake news.

This was "passed" by 10 socialists, out of a 577-person council, who held an essentially secret vote to guarantee the proposal was "approved." This is a political trick. No one supports this. It will not pass.

In the U.S. this would be like if the 3 representatives from Wyoming and the Dakotas had a slumber party and the "caucus" decided to push a bill that required all children in the country to read the bible before going to bed, and then everyone on the internet started saying "U.S. lawmakers approve bill to force children to read the bible!!!" There's a ridiculous amount of information being intentionally left out of that headline to get you to click it, and to encourage lazy "I only read the headline" and updoot farmers like the OP to repost it.

Here is an article that actually explains this, not some dried up old internet message board desperate for clicks. https://tech-insider.org/french-lawmakers-per-gigabyte-internet-traffic-tax-11-10-vote-2026/

PROTIP: If something on the internet outrages you or seems completely insane, it's probably fake. Spend 10 seconds in Google before freaking out in comments and being an easily manipulated rube.

This will just result in more companies blocking France.

That would be kinda insane. It would be $12 just to download gta 6😂

French lawmakers seem to enjoy causing riots.

There certainly wont be a way to tanper with this, right? Like nobody would maliciously start to load content from a platform now just to increase their bill.

It's basically an internet shutdown disguised as a tax. If it applied only to GAFAM I would support it, let's get them out of the market

France looked at internet connections people already pay for and thought: what if we taxed the contents too? Apparently the only thing that should be unlimited is the government’s appetite for new revenue. And somehow they’re surprised when people suggest the bill will end up with consumers.

France has approved a proposed tax that aims to tax the amount of internet data per gigabyte sent to French users in the country, with major companies like Google, Netflix, TikTok, and Meta now in the crosshairs. According to minutes released by the National Assembly, members voted 11-10 in support of the motion on October 30 — which now means the new law has been added to the country’s next budget, despite major opposition from the government side and the finance committee rapporteur. The law still has to pass through the Senate for final approval. The latest amendment, introduced by socialist lawmaker Laurent Lhardit, could see content providers pay €0.055 (roughly $0.06) to the government for every gigabyte of content distributed to French users.

So not the end user directly, but the companies who deliver the content. Like a fee to access France's users, pay to play.

It's a proposed law... like most laws, it will almost certainly die along the way, or be altered to irrelevance.

Think through this for a hot second about how such a law could affect EU internal trade and complicate external trade. Of course it will die.

Stop hyperventilating.

Couldn't this be abused? What's stopping me from using a VPN node in France and downloading terabytes from google, meta, etc.? But I guess they will start capping traffic to French addresses.

This makes no bloody sense. Either the pipe is in use, or it isn't. The "water" itself is infinite, so long as the device on the other end has electricity. I assume people in France already pay their electric bill.

Air fiber, nodes of wifi that dont follow power regulations. This may birth the next internet?

I don’t support doing this legislatively, but there should be a greater incentive to optimize storage size and bandwidth. Broadband has made us far too comfortable with unnecessarily large files and inefficient compression.

frenchy budget is pretty fucked. they do be needing more revenue.