Kuai Technology, November 3 — French authorities are drafting a controversial new internet traffic tax, with taxation rules calculated on a tiered basis directly tied to the volume of data that content providers transmit to users within France. For every 1GB of data sent to French users, the corresponding operator would be required to pay 0.055 euros — roughly 0.4 yuan.

According to the published amendment text, the taxpayers under this new levy would clearly be all content providers — both overseas and domestic — that send data to French users. Ordinary internet users would not bear the cost, nor would telecom operators be responsible for this portion.

French internet access service providers would be required to quarterly tally the total data traffic sent by their respective partner content providers to their own users, aggregate the figures, and report them directly to local tax authorities. The entire statistical process would be overseen throughout by French telecom regulator Arcep.

The amendment cites publicly available estimates from Arcep showing that French internet users receive approximately 200 billion GB of data annually, with five companies — Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, and leading US content delivery service provider Akamai — accounting for half of the total.

To avoid imposing excessive tax burdens on leading companies, the amendment specifically sets a dual taxation cap: the total traffic tax ultimately payable by a single company would not exceed 15% of its French regional revenue, nor exceed 2% of the company's total global revenue.

Based on a rough calculation at the published rate, a large AAA game of about 200GB, each time downloaded by a user within France, would theoretically require the corresponding distribution platform to pay about 11 euros in traffic tax for that data transmission. Such costs would likely be passed on to users or downstream partners.

This bill has faced collective opposition from major global internet tech giants as soon as it was exposed, with French local internet tech companies reacting most strongly. However, judging from the current progress, this controversial tax is still very far from actually taking effect.

The public voting records of the French National Assembly show that in the first round of voting on this amendment, only 35 lawmakers participated, of whom 14 directly chose to abstain. Both the French government and the National Assembly's budget report have clearly stated their opposition to this traffic tax proposal.

This model of directly taxing content service providers by traffic is essentially France's attempt to make overseas tech giants pay for local network infrastructure costs. However, there are too many ambiguities in the taxation rules, and it offends the interests of both overseas giants and local tech companies. It will likely undergo significant adjustments through multiple rounds of negotiation, and the possibility of it being implemented unchanged is extremely low.