France is getting download tax for content providers (€0.055/GB)

Not simply EUR 5.5 cents per GB! The tax is limited to 15% of revenue from data transmission in France, or 2% of total global revenues.

So Netflix pays max 15% of streaming revenue in France. If you and I start a streaming service only in France, we pay a max 2% of streaming revenue in France (because that's the only place where we stream). So there's potentially a protectionist element. But note that you and I could do our France-only service from anywhere and still be capped at 2%, according to the law as I understand it (not a lawyer).

> « La taxe sur les producteurs de données numériques fait l’objet d’un plafonnement correspondant au maximum à 15 % du chiffre d’affaires réalisé en France par l’émetteur ou à 2 % de son chiffre d’affaires total. [1]

"The tax on digital service producers has a ceiling that corresponds to a maximum of 15% of France-based revenue by the transmitter or 2% of its total revenue (my translation)."

[1] https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...

It's in incredible how hostile this tax is but I have to give them credit. They just see something that's productive and valuable and they just see money they can extort from people.

No justification, like gasoline tax, which is used to fix the roads and fund green technology. Or tax on stock buybacks which have questionable value in society. Or carbon tax.

Just see something people do and tax it.

I wonder if this got solved anywhere yet: how do you get politicians that actually want to save money instead of raising taxes or creating new types of taxes?

I understand that it’s way easier and quicker to do the latter instead of saving.

That’s the reason they do it in the first place.

I just wonder if there is a way to incentivize them to save instead. Maybe some country was successful at one point in time.

Maybe this would at least have the silver lining of forcing website operators to not ship 100MB of bloated javascript mess and auto playing video

This was a proposal, and it was rejected. Not an actual tax or law.

If the US were to follow this excellent idea to raise revenue, it could completely solve the federal budget deficit.

A modest download tax of USD $2.07 per GB suffices.

Estimate:

  - 134 million households
  - approx 80% of households subscribe to home broadband
  - approx 750 GB download per month per household
  - $2 trillion annual deficit
  - assumes no change in household behaviour in response to the new tax

How to get rioting people off the streets and into their homes watching Netflix ...

Let's see ...

Content tax?

The dreaded cloud egress tax, except now it's actually a tax.

11 votes to 10… there was basically no one to vote for.

Stop wasting your time on that, it’s going to get removed next time.

I actually like the idea of this, but with some restrictions (and wouldn't mind seeing it in the US). Yes, I know the costs are passed thru to consumers.

Here's my thinking:

1. Limit who is charged based on how much bandwidth they consume / month. If it's over 1TB, the tax goes into affect. This helps small businesses.

2. If (1) can't work, we can do it based on income from French users above X / month.

3. Tax income must go towards infrastructure projects: Parks & Recs, Fiber buildouts, etc.

The stated reason is that physical business, when they use the country's infrastructure pay tax to contribute to the upkeep. But presumably, internet businesses, especially those based outside the country use the infrastructure but do not pay for the upkeep. This tax is supposed to address this issue.

While the solution might not be optimal, how valid is the underlying problem? Can someone make genuine steelman arguments?

I would riot too.

France is in pretty bad financial shape, so they are going to be looking at getting money wherever they can.

Europe never beating the allegations...

This will severely undermine technological innovation and the development of new technologies.

Wow. That's more than the cost of the storage space you'd be downloading onto.

I tried playing the monster mash on YouTube tonight. It played two ads then started the song but the video had a weird ai avatar performing. It played for five seconds then started playing another ad.

I'm just bitching....

Compression is tax evasion!

This tax is not well thought but we need to tax those companies that evade taxes. Let's be creative and strong.

Can't wait to only be able to stream 240p

This is going to well with the digital only ps5

What an obtuse way to tax these services.

Reeks of desperation from a group of bureaucrats who are capable of nothing but taxing people

Who had this idea? This would have the effect that paid services get more expensive and free services get lower quality, stop working, or become illegal.

Putting that aside, I'd be interested in how they'd want to measure this when in practice network traffic is delivered over all kinds of CDNs and rented servers from who knows where. The technicalities of determining who would have to pay seem very non-trivial to me.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50308240

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