The French National Assembly has adopted an amendment to the Finance Act of 2027, which a 0.055 € cost on every gigabyte of data transmitted to users in France. It cleared with a single vote among the deputies who participated, 11 to 10, according to a report by Techaeris.
The tax would fall on content and data providers: Netflix, Google, Meta, Amazon, Akamai, game distribution platforms and similar services. Consumers would not receive a separate line item at checkout for each download.
Revenue caps apply. The proposal limits liability to the maximum of 15% of a company’s French revenue or 2% of its global revenue, which means that the gross per gigabyte arithmetic exceeds what large companies actually owe.
The GTA 6 number is doing the rounds
A reported 210–218 GB download produces around €12 in theoretical tax liability for the distributor, which is arithmetic, not a price tag.
At €0.055 per GB, a 218 GB file generates approx €12 and potential tax burden for the distributor. This figure has been widely circulated since the vote, and it is truly illustrative of the scale of the proposal.
Here’s what it’s not: a confirmed surcharge French buyers would pay for GTA 6. Rockstar Games has not confirmed the final file size of the game, and no price adjustment has been identified in a verified source. The €12 now exists as a multiplication problem, nothing more.
Streaming Faces the Bigger Bill
One-time downloads are a round error compared to what continuous video consumption generates at scale.
A single game download is a one-time data event. A Netflix subscriber watching 4K content burns approx 7 GB per hour over millions of sessions per month, and the aggregate load connections quickly. Services like YouTube, TikTok, and cloud platforms have the same math.
Game updates, downloadable content and reinstallations may also fall within the scope, per a report from univers-simu.com. These transfers often do not generate new revenue for the provider, which is where the policy begins to resemble a blunt instrument aimed at the wrong target.
A tax that can’t tell the difference
The proposal penalizes a profitable sale and a failed download retry in exactly the same way.
That is the structural problem. A per-gigabyte levy treats a 100 GB game sale, a 100 GB patch, and a 100 GB re-download after a corrupt install as identical events. The bytes are the same; the revenue is not.
Smaller platforms and indie distributors absorb this more painfully than Google or a large publisher. They lack the global pricing power to spread liability across a broad base of subscribers or markets.
The proposal doesn’t require anyone to pass costs on to consumers, but it also doesn’t prevent it. The results are determined by companies whose incentive is to protect the margin, not to protect French subscribers from higher prices.
Good data regulation would tie liability to commercial activity, not raw bytes transferred. A framework that distinguishes a revenue-generating transaction from a free update would be more difficult to write. It would also be much easier to defend.
What happens next
The change still has parliamentary stages to survive, and nothing is confirmed.
This proposal is not a law. It must clarify the remaining stages of the French budget process, where it can be changed, weakened or completely dropped. No platform should adjust French prices, and no subscriber should recalculate a streaming bill.
The vote signals political appetite for taxing data streams at the provider level. Whether a final version will be accurate enough to actually work remains an open question, and right now the evidence for an answer isn’t there.