How am I supposed to download anything if the government takes 5.5%? The checksums will not match!
This was fake news the first 900 times it was posted, and still is. France doesn’t “plan” this. 10 fringe people with no power or influence suggested it. Everyone has already rejected it.
Again, here is the real story behind the sensationalized headlines https://tech-insider.org/french-lawmakers-per-gigabyte-internet-traffic-tax-11-10-vote-2026/
Headlines called it an approval, and technically it was. But the vote covered one amendment during the first reading of the 2027 finance bill, only 35 of the Assembly’s 577 deputies took part, and the government opposed it. Nothing here is law.
Thank you for the fact check. Lemmy has a serious issue with bogus sensationalized headlines with no context offered.
This has been standard operational procedure for some other governments around the world: transpire that some outlandish law is being considered, wait for the wave of indignation, get what you wanted to regulate in the first place approved while the people wave their pitchforks. Rinse and repeat.
What a comically bad idea.
That tax is 1) going to just be a drag on everything IT, and 2) that is a higher tax than bandwidth costs, by a pretty good margin.
bandwidth at the scale of a large isp costs one to a few pennies per megabit/sec per month to deliver.
you can download about 325 gigabytes in a month with 1 megabit/sec speed.
They think it’s some brilliant scheme against big tech, when really it’s so obvious that they’re just going to tack the tax onto the users bill. French Netflix users will now have a “usage tax” on every bill, guaranteed.
It’s exactly the same thinking as the tarriffs. They think businesses will eat that cost and protect the customers? BS they will they’ll pass it on down.
Setting aside economic impact, I’m skeptical that this is actually a good idea, purely in terms of political capital.
Like…here in the US, gas taxes have a wildly-disproportionate political impact, in part because they’re constantly thrown in your face. Signs all over outdoors with them.
If every time a French user of Steam, say, wants to download a game that they already bought and they’re presented with a fee from Steam or something, I think that that’s probably going to make the tax highly-visible to French voters, and probably unpopular.
It looks like Call of Duty is over 1TB. Okay, so Valve is probably telling you to pay your 55 euro or whatever French Internet Tax every time you want to install the game. That’s probably going to generate upset pretty quickly.
The lawmakers are all rich so they do not care
Initiative to make it exhorbitantly expensive to request user data from services?
I shudder to imagine what using Google takeout would be like under this.Good job France for emboldening American big tech’s market domination, I guess.
Plus it would open the door for even more tracking.
If that goes through, it’s going to make local caching a lot more financially-appealing in France.
Imagine if programs were built for efficiency again…
Does this mean they’ll actually market plans in the gigabyte instead of the misleading gigabit?
Gigabit makes more sense
