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.
“No no no stupid people, we don’t tax you, we tax the data”. Obviously this government will neeeeeeeever tax the rich
It would be making the companies pay for their delivery of content, so not a direct payment by the customer. Companies play to play for access to French citizens. How the companies deal with that is hugely variable, but think of this as a step towards wealth tax.
Also France desperately needs more revenue as it is nearing a debt crisis on it’s own, which might be some of what is behind this.
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.
i mean france has passed similarly draconian taxes before that caused riots.
Lemmy’s pretty good about getting to the meat of a thing, but other platforms will breathlessly report a proposed law by a freshmen state congressmen as a done deal. Some dude’s been in his state’s congress for a few months, proposes some bullshit to get his name in the news, and it works every damned time.
That would be kinda insane. It would be $12 just to download gta 6😂
How about just banning sales of GTA 6 and anything Rockstar, or even better, Take-Two as a whole releases?
How about living in reality?
This will just result in more companies blocking France.
Maybe, but do you drop the 7th largest economy in the world, and entree into others? Not saying it will work, but as a pushback of the wealthy it’s an interesting leverage.
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.
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.
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