Per‑gigabyte tax on internet traffic

France’s National Assembly adopted an amendment to add a charge of €0.055 per gigabyte delivered to French users into the next budget, potentially targeting Google, Meta, Netflix, Amazon and CDNs and estimating about €10 billion annual revenue. The mechanism would require ISPs to measure traffic originators and report volumes quarterly to the tax authority under regulator Arcep oversight, raising measurement, privacy and compliance challenges and sparking pushback from nonprofits and industry. — If enacted, a per‑GB tax creates a new regulatory lever that changes how platforms, CDNs and ISPs are paid, creating cross‑border precedent for taxing attention and data flows rather than profits or ads.