A narrow victory after an earlier rejection
Just 35 of the Assembly's 577 deputies, about 6%, participated in the vote. There were 14 abstentions alongside the 11 votes in favor and 10 against, according to PPC Land. All the supporters belonged to left-wing groups, Dave Manuel reported. The far-right Rassemblement National's decision to abstain, with 10 deputies present, determined the outcome.
Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit filed the measure on October 9, 2026. It is amendment I-1358 to the 2027 finance bill, bill no. 3210, and has 68 co-signatories, including former President François Hollande, Olivier Faure and Boris Vallaud, according to PPC Land.
A nearly identical proposal had failed in the Assembly's Finance Committee on October 9. Budget Minister David Amiel and the committee's rapporteur general, Philippe Juvin, opposed the amendment during the debate in the chamber, Dave Manuel reported.
How the traffic levy would work
Content providers would owe €0.55, about $0.62, for every gigabyte they deliver to users in France. The amendment's authors project annual receipts of approximately €10 billion ($11.2 billion), according to Tom's Hardware. Supporters put the number of users in France at about 154 million.
Google, Meta, Netflix, Amazon and Akamai are named as potential payers in the explanatory notes. Whether TikTok and comparable platforms would also pay would depend on the rules' application. The measure includes content delivery networks such as Akamai, which keep copies of material near users to shorten loading times and ease network congestion.
Internet service providers would be responsible for tracking traffic volumes and identifying the companies sending the data. Under Arcep's supervision, they would send quarterly reports to the French tax administration. The amendment also specifies a cap of 15% of a company's revenue in France or 2% of its global revenue.
Disagreement over who would bear the cost
French internet providers carry roughly 200 billion gigabytes annually. The amendment attributes about half of that traffic to five major companies. Lhardit argued that global technology businesses would therefore shoulder most of the levy.
Amiel challenged that assessment. He told the Assembly that smaller content providers, including French businesses, would account for about half the projected receipts, or roughly €5 billion, according to PPC Land. VideoLAN, the Paris-based nonprofit that makes the VLC media player, said on October 30 that its annual bill would exceed €1 million.
Lhardit described the business costs as relatively modest, citing TF1 and putting broadcasters' contributions at €200,000 to €300,000. He also dismissed the argument that platforms would simply transfer the expense to consumers, questioning how that would work for free services such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Privacy is another point of opposition. Amiel questioned whether providers could measure traffic and identify its source without introducing complex monitoring requirements.
Other taxes and traffic-charging precedents
The proposed levy would charge for data volume. Existing digital services taxes in several European countries generally target revenue from activities such as advertising and online marketplaces. In March, Meta announced plans to add location-based advertiser fees in France, Italy and Spain starting July 1, 2026, to offset digital services taxes and other government levies.
A related proposal to make large traffic senders pay network operators did not make it into the European Commission's January 2026 Digital Networks Act proposal. European telecommunications operators had long sought those payments under the banner of "fair share."
Dave Manuel identifies South Korea as the closest real-world test of sender-based traffic charges. After the country introduced a "sending party pays" rule between internet providers in 2016, Facebook disabled a cache within one provider's network; latency more than quadrupled for some users. Twitch withdrew from South Korea in February 2024, citing network costs it described as prohibitively expensive.
The French debate also sits alongside broader disputes over technology regulation. The European Commission has imposed a €5 billion penalty on Google over Android antitrust violations and a €100 million fine on Facebook for misleading regulators. Apple and Meta received fines of €500 million and €200 million, respectively, in 2025. The United States denounced those penalties as "a novel form of economic extortion" and said it would not tolerate them.
The budget votes still ahead
Passing an amendment does not ensure its survival in the final budget. During the previous budget cycle, the Assembly rejected the entire bill in November 2025, taking many floor-approved tax amendments down with it. The 2026 budget ultimately passed in early 2026 after three uses of Article 49.3, Dave Manuel reported.
The revenue portion of the 2027 budget, which includes the traffic tax, is scheduled for a full Assembly vote on Tuesday, November 3, 2026. If that portion fails, the government's original text, without the levy, would proceed to the Senate. Dave Manuel reports that the center-right Les Républicains hold the majority there and are not expected to retain the tax. The proposal must still complete the remaining budget stages before it can become law.
