The French National Assembly passed an amendment to the 2027 finance bill that would impose a €0.055 charge on every gigabyte of data transmitted to users in France. It cleared by a single vote among the deputies who participated, 11 to 10, according to reporting from 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 the gross per-gigabyte arithmetic overstates what large companies would actually owe.
The GTA 6 Number Making the Rounds
A reported 210–218 GB download produces roughly €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 approximately €12 in potential tax exposure for the distributor. That figure has circulated widely since the vote, and it is genuinely illustrative of the proposal’s scale.
Here is what it is not: a confirmed surcharge French buyers would pay for GTA 6. Rockstar Games has not confirmed the game’s final file size, and no pricing adjustment has been identified in any source reviewed. The €12 exists right now as a multiplication problem, nothing more.
Streaming Faces the Bigger Bill
One-time downloads are a rounding 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 through roughly 7 GB per hour across millions of sessions per month, and that aggregate exposure compounds fast. Services like YouTube, TikTok, and cloud platforms face the same math.
Game updates, downloadable content, and reinstalls could also fall within scope, per reporting from univers-simu.com. Those transfers frequently generate no new revenue for the provider, which is where the policy begins to resemble a blunt instrument aimed at the wrong target.
A Tax That Cannot Tell the Difference
The proposal penalizes a profitable sale and a failed download retry 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 corrupted install as identical events. The bytes are the same; the revenue is not.
Smaller platforms and indie distributors absorb that cost more painfully than Google or a major publisher. They lack the global pricing power to spread the liability across a broad base of subscribers or markets.
The proposal does not require anyone to pass costs to consumers, but it does not prevent it either. Outcomes are determined by companies whose incentive is to protect margin, not to shield 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 harder to write. It would also be far easier to defend.
What Happens Next
The amendment still has parliamentary stages to survive, and nothing is confirmed.
This proposal is not law. It must clear the remaining stages of France’s budget process, where it can be amended, weakened, or dropped entirely. No platform should be adjusting French pricing, and no subscriber should be recalculating a streaming bill yet.
The vote signals political appetite for taxing data flows at the provider level. Whether any final version is precise enough to actually work remains an open question, and right now, the evidence for an answer is not there.
