France Has Not Passed a Pay-Per-Gigabyte Law: What Amendment I-1358 Would Do

France has not passed a law charging people per gigabyte. No such tax is in force, and this amendment would not put a per-gigabyte charge on your internet bill.

What actually happened: on 30 October 2026, the Assemblée nationale adopted, in first reading, an amendment to the 2027 budget bill. It would tax companies that send data to French subscribers. Nothing is in force.

Is France making people pay per gigabyte?

No. The proposal is amendment n° I-1358 to the projet de loi de finances pour 2027 (bill n° 3210), tabled by Laurent Lhardit and the Socialist group. It would add articles 302 bis ZP to 302 bis ZS to the general tax code and create a "taxe sur les producteurs de données numériques", a tax on digital data producers. The sender would pay, not the subscriber.

Where the text stands:

• Adopted by the Assemblée in first reading on Friday 30 October 2026, on a thin margin: 21 votes cast, 11 for, 10 against, with 35 deputies taking part.
• Both the rapporteur général, Philippe Juvin, and the government, through minister David Amiel, gave an unfavourable opinion, according to the official record.
• The rate, as the amendment defines it, is 0.055 euro per gigabyte of data sent to a French subscriber. Internet access providers do not pay: they count volumes per sender and report quarterly to the tax administration (DGFiP), under the supervision of Arcep and the DGFiP.

What did the deputies actually vote for?

Beyond the headline rate of 5.5 euro cents per gigabyte, charged to the sender, the amendment sets out a counting machine. In one sentence: the tax would bill companies for the volume of data they send to French subscribers, not the people who receive it.

How the text would work:

• The count holds the sending company's identity, its IANA registration number and the volume. The text says no record of content or destination can be required. Technical rules are left to a decree.
• Where a sender uses a CDN, the volume equals the flows leaving the CDN, so caching near users does not reduce the count.
• A cap: at most 15% of the sender's French revenue or 2% of its total revenue. The authors cite sectors with heavy data per euro of revenue, such as video on demand and video games.
• Groups with a French entity pay like corporation tax. Groups without one get a tax notice by 30 January and pay by 30 March of the following year.

The text also leaves gaps: no minimum size threshold, no definition of "content provider" (fournisseur de contenu), no start date. The authors' figures of 200 billion gigabytes a year and an expected yield of 10 billion euros, with Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai at about half the traffic, are the authors' estimates, not an official evaluation. Arcep's own report puts Akamai, Netflix, Amazon, Google and Meta at 49% of traffic relayed to end users at the end of 2025.

Who would pay, and could it reach your bill?

The sender pays. Under this text you would never receive a gigabyte bill, and your data allowance is not touched by it. The arithmetic, charged to the sender: 1 GB costs 5.5 euro cents, so 100 GB would be 5.50 euros before the cap. Across the authors' 200 billion gigabytes a year, that is 11 billion euros before the cap.

Whether companies pass the cost on is an open question. In the debate, minister David Amiel said half the tax, 5 billion euros on the authors' figures, would fall on smaller content providers, notably French ones. Philippe Juvin said the large platforms could pass it on to advertisers. Laurent Lhardit replied that he could not see how it could be passed on to users of Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, since those cost users nothing, and put the cost for the TF1 group at 200,000 to 300,000 euros.

• Journal du Geek reported that VideoLAN, the association behind VLC, wrote that the tax would cost it over 1 million euros a year, and that Lhardit answered that the tax is capped and would not apply to it at all.
• Nothing in the text rules pass-through in or out. A price rise by a service you subscribe to would be that service's decision, not a charge levied on you.

This text is not a cap on your connection. For how volume limits work on consumer plans, see our explainer on ISP data caps.

Which services are covered?

Fewer than the headlines suggest. The tax articles in the amendment name no company or service. The explanatory note and the recorded debate supply the names. Here is where things stand as of 1 November.

"Named as a company" means the parent appears in the explanatory note, not the service itself. Neither YouTube Live nor Twitch is named in the amendment. Cloud storage, backups, video calls, messaging, software updates and peer-to-peer traffic are absent from the amendment too. The text does not define what "content provider" covers, and it is unclear where that would be settled.

Are VPNs covered?

The text never mentions VPNs, as a service or as traffic. That much is fact, checked against the text. What follows is our reading.

An ISP cannot see inside a tunnel. It sees traffic arriving from the VPN server, so under this counting method tunnelled traffic would probably be counted against whoever the ISP sees as the sender: the VPN provider, or the network its server sits on. That part is unconfirmed, and a decree would decide. The amendment's explanatory note says transit providers and CDNs need not name their clients, and may rebill them or not under their own sales terms. So a network charged for that traffic could pass the cost on to a VPN provider under its contract. A VPN provider could therefore end up a payer, or see higher costs. Nobody has said so officially. Le VPN is a VPN provider, so this reading concerns us too. Nothing changes for Le VPN subscribers today, because nothing is in force.

Provider location would not take a provider outside the text. The count happens at the French ISP, and the text covers groups with no French entity. How that would be enforced on small foreign companies is unknown.

For a subscriber, none of this creates a way out, because you are not the one charged. A VPN cannot shield you from a price rise by a service you subscribe to, and total gigabytes do not shrink through a tunnel; a tunnel adds a little overhead. For the mechanics, see how a VPN works.

One earlier text is unrelated: amendment n° I-1788 to the 2026 finance bill proposed a 1% revenue tax on operators providing virtual private networks, to fund sport, on the argument that VPNs feed piracy. It was tabled in October 2025 and rejected and has nothing to do with I-1358.

Does this fit EU net neutrality rules?

The EU's net neutrality rules, Regulation 2015/2120, set duties on providers of internet access services, including the duty to treat traffic equally under Article 3. They are not a tax law. The amendment taxes senders of data, not access providers, so the two texts address different parties. Laurent Lhardit told the chamber that the tax respects net neutrality. That is the authors' claim, not a settled judgment.

The wider EU direction is relevant too. The Commission's Digital Networks Act proposal of 21 January 2026 dropped network fees for big platforms, and Agence Europe links this to the EU-US framework statement that the EU "will not introduce or maintain network usage charges". That statement concerns charges for using networks, while this is a tax paid to the state, and whether the two collide has not been tested.

As of 1 November, we found no court ruling and no opinion from Arcep or the Commission on this amendment. One Paris law firm flags constitutional and EU law risks for an earlier committee version of the same text:

• a raw volume base, measured in gigabytes rather than value;
• freedom of establishment, if the collection rules weigh more heavily on foreign groups.

That is a commentator's view, not a ruling. For the background rules, see our explainer on net neutrality.

Will it become law?

Too early to say. The next fixed date is the solemn vote on the first part of the budget bill, scheduled for Tuesday 3 November 2026 in the afternoon. That vote covers the whole first part of the bill as amended, not the data tax on its own. The amendment only stands if the Assemblée adopts that first part; if it is rejected, the government's original text goes to the Senate (Silicon).

What to watch, in order:

• The 3 November solemn vote in the Assemblée.
• Any text the government passes under Article 49.3, which could leave this amendment out.
• The Senate, where Next considers adoption unlikely given the Les Républicains majority.
• The final budget, where the measure can still be changed or removed.
• A decree, which would have to settle the technical counting rules before any tax could actually be assessed.

The amendment has cleared one reading, by a single vote, with both the rapporteur général and the government against it. In the debate, minister David Amiel also questioned how the flows would be measured. That is a long way from a law in force. Each stage above is a point where the text could be rewritten or dropped, and only the last one, the decree, would turn the rate and the counting method into something a company could be billed under.

What should you do now?

Nothing has to change today. No tax is in force, no decree exists, and no subscriber in France owes anything under this text. If you already use a VPN, this amendment gives you no new reason to start, stop or switch anything; our page on VPNs in France covers what a VPN does and does not do.

Three things are worth doing:

• Ignore any claim that a per-gigabyte charge is about to appear on your internet bill. The amendment charges senders, not subscribers, and it has cleared only one reading.
• Watch for price notices from the services you pay for. If the tax survives and a service decides to pass costs on, that would show up as a price change from the service, not as a charge from your provider.
• Wait for the decree for the counting rules. The treatment of live video, cloud services and small senders, and any start date, are not settled in the text and may need more than a decree.

The next marker is the solemn vote on 3 November 2026. After that, the Senate and the final budget decide whether this text survives in any form.

This article reflects the position as of 1 November 2026, before that vote.