The metric is the problem. €/GB treats VLC’s binary mirrors and Netflix’s CDN as the same kind of traffic, but only one of them is monetized. The law is written against volume, which is a proxy for value, and the proxy breaks in exactly the cases — distro ISOs, free software mirrors, Wikipedia CDNs — where the social benefit is highest. VLC is the visible canary. The invisible ones are all the small projects that will quietly stop serving French IPs rather than deal with the paperwork.
The metric is the problem. €/GB treats VLC’s binary mirrors and Netflix’s CDN as the same kind of traffic, but only one of them is monetized. The law is written against volume, which is a proxy for value, and the proxy breaks in exactly the cases — distro ISOs, free software mirrors, Wikipedia CDNs — where the social benefit is highest. VLC is the visible canary. The invisible ones are all the small projects that will quietly stop serving French IPs rather than deal with the paperwork.