French lawmakers approved a tax of €0.055 for every gigabyte of internet traffic

I live in Hungary where this is common but it's more like a "you pay tax for storage which goes to the labels, in turn we don't prosecute piracy" https://www.artisjus.hu/english/copyright-in-hungary/

Mind you we have a hungarian private torrent tracker with 400k users and 2.7 petabyte of data running since 2005. Virtually everyone is using it in the country but no one really wants to shut it down because at this point it's also a cultural archive.

Yes, France is in the EU. However, the actions of France do not equate to the actions of the EU.

Despite what pro-Brexit type people will tell you, there is a lot of sovereignty in local laws within the EU. And the ability to set your own taxes is one of them.

But I especially think your last point about old people is really both false and irrelevant. If I wanted to troll, I could say it's really dumb, just americans being americans.

Btw, the EU is a tech powerhouse, you just don't know that. ASML, Zeiss, TRUMPF, etc. have full monopoly on eUV lithography and majority of the market on any other nodes. Just one example.

Airbus leads with about 55%–60% of the active narrow and wide-body commercial aircraft market. Airbus has much better track record and doesn't collide with FAA and doesn't "skimp" on development and QA (I'm looking at you MCAS!).

The culture is right there, we are taking our sweet time.

Yes, but... isn't their assumption mostly correct? Spotify and Co have changed the equation in the sense that one doesn't have files anymore but when those laws came out they targeted MP3 players and DVDs who were, indeed, full of pirated media.

I don't like the result for other reasons, but the assumption seemed always relatively accurate.

Counterpoint: I am behind the gfw.. and seriously dont understand how anyone can get anything done… but it still seems to work… i pay like 2 euros for 500MBit fiber

There are people who consider this a good thing. I don’t have a strong opinion on it, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.

You shouldn't. Nor should you conclude anything general about the EU from something French politicans do. It's disingenuous.

Tax their bloody real estate into poverty because that's the only message they'll understand.

It's also disappointing to see how many users here, people who you'd expect to at least have a mild familiarity with the internet and how it works, don't read the article, comments, or sometimes even the entire OP. They see a title that supports their biases, make wild assumptions, and immediately move to spitting vitriol into the comments.

What a horrible idea. This is like creating a special tax on start up capital. It goes against so many fundamentals, such as increasing efficiency, productivity, automation, carbon. It's just crazy.

I also don't live in France and think it's dumb but I think we need better information than the topic line to have real discussion of it.

It passed 11 to 10 and has to still pass in the French senate's version of their finance bill and the French government is against it. [2]

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

[2] https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1750726/article/2026-10-30/l-ass...

That would make Netflix like 30-50% more expensive.

What on earth is going on in this comment section? Seems like it's 99% of Americans who obviously didn't read the session notes themselves, or even any background information in English, before commenting on this with their least charitable reading. I don't get it, why?

If you don't understand the thing, probably because you haven't spent even 2 minutes looking up information about it, why comment about some scenario you don't even know if it applies or not? Like what's the point, just to spread FUD for the fun of it?

There are over 10,000 taxing jurisdictions in the US, so good luck with even trying to figure how many different taxes.

Is it even a clear problem to figure out which business pays what?

more tax revenue from any source they can imagine. Instead of trying to cut out the welfare, and reign in spending, it's always easier to propose a tax that's small and widespread (so that each individual may not be incentivized to fight it).

And it applies to free services too, which will recover the expense by increasing the ads

The situation is resulting in this terrible feedback loop of higher taxation, increased regulation, decreased productivity, and increased poverty. And then people turn to socialist politics which just continues to exacerbate the situation.