> It feels absurd to punish data heavy companies. What a weird proxy disciminator. Makes so little sense.
This is part of the net-0 narrative and the degrowth movement that's been growing(no pun intended) in Europe. Nevermind that growth in the EU is already pretty low to begin with...
There was a blast of anti-datacenter either propgoanda or just incredibly bad science, a bit before the AI craze, where they took the total amount of internet traffic, the total amount of data center energy usage, then said, well, netflix is x% of bandwidth so it must be x% of energy usage too.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/industries-in-depth/carbon-f...
In the spirit of radical misunderstanding I assume this ridiculous proposition is continuing to be foisted upon people. A "Badhearts Law" (riffing Goodheart's "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") if you will: finding a bad measure to make bad accusations.
(The idea that AI is going to pay a heavy tax or even medium tax for this seems like some super wishful thinking.)
Is this then to counter tax avoidance by companies that conveniently transfer the profits out of the country? "Oh no we made a loss in France so no tax to pay in France because we had to pay our Irish subsidiary €1bn for digital services".
I don't know if this is one of those cases but governments are generally trying to figure out how to avoid such transfers away of tax revenue.
They made a pension plan that relied on people having more kids and not getting jobs outsourced, then they didn't ahve kids and got outsourced.
Then there is the whole "they literally never decolonized out of africa" just to keep the economy going this long and that is unable to be exploited like in the past.
They cut the kid's programs to the bone and the kids told them in the most french way possible that that was bad. Inequality has been worse than 1789 for years now.
France has sky high taxes and yet they run a 5% deficit. Cant cut social programs that are way too generous (in relation to income) so higher taxes it is.
Most of that money is getting sucked up by landlords. If they reduced rent they could reduce pensions by the same amount but it seems like high rent is a sacred cow to them.
Is there some structural reason that they can't reduce rent by developing a lot more housing? Is it purely artificial government rules preventing the construction of new housing — or are there actual constraints in terms of capital, labor, or materials?
then why not have an annual "please help us keep the government running tax" and at least be honest? Why invent taxes on things that don't make sense?
A tax is usually applied to help facilitate maintenance for something you are using. Or to disincentivize "bad" behavior. For example i pay taxes in the US that directly help pay for public schools, the fire department, roads, etc.
How does the french government bear any cost if i download data from a data center? What bad behavior is disincentivezed with this tax?
So why dont we tax air? Everyone is breathing all the time, if the point of a Tax is to raise revenue we should be taxing every breath
Oh yeah you also have to not kill the population economically. What about the citizens who are doing large scale research on datasets? Those are the ones who are going to make billion dollar companies and they wont happen if they are watching the meter all the time because the government has decided to tax thought, so better not think too much!
A massive portion of our lawmakers are absolute clowns too, it's not exclusive to the US.
Note that this amendment to the law was passed with 11 votes for, 10 no... With a national assembly of 577. I have to assume it was voted at night, that's when peak democracy happens.
France is spiraling into a debt whirlpool needing to use debt to pay off debt, basically having no good way to resolve the issue without a lot of pain (“austerity”). Any politician with enough foresight to do what needs to be done gets removed, so those that remain are selected for their thick foreheads.
What’s more fun is that while france is teetering on the brink, it’s hardly alone, and it’s collapse will tip the dominoes.
Which was predicted by some economists from day one.
One economist wrote, before the first Euro even circulated: "The euro will lead to too many public servants in France, too many industries in Germany, too many vacation houses in Spain [1], the default of Spain on its public debt and then the default of Greece on its public debt".
When Greece, not Spain, defaulted on its public debt, that same economist: "I was only wrong about the order of defaults of Greece and Spain".
The Euro, he predicted, would be one of the shortest lived currency in the history of currencies.
His name is Charles Gave and he's gotta be 80 y/o old now. Of course people are going to hate on him and spill all their hatred on him because he's neither a communism nor a socialist.
And then idiots are going to say that "euro is great because I can travel and pay in the same currency everywhere". As if they're own little convenience warranted the disaster that we're heading into because ideologues, not economists, decided to force a currency down the throat of most european citizens.
[1] btw there are many protests in Spain now because "costs of rents are too high" (yeah, no shit: there's a gigantic number of empty houses and apartment in Spain belonging to foreigners, who only come a few weeks per year).
California has some fiscal problems but if any state hits a crisis point it will probably be Illinois first. US states don't issue their own currency and have limited ability to take on debt so even if California is forced to raise taxes and default on obligations that probably won't trigger a broader systemic collapse.
> Any politician with enough foresight to do what needs to be done gets removed, so those that remain are selected for their thick foreheads.
I probably should have quoted this part too. I was replying to the whole comment about the changing winds of politics. The economics is just one of the symptoms.
I kept posting about it here over the years but at officially 57% of the GDP being public spending (and the actual percentage is bigger than that because a great many of the "private" companies that are monopolies are basically owned by state apparatchiks), France is already a planned economy.
And there's only one outcome for planned economies and its misery.
And when socialists succeed in establishing misery, they've guaranteed themselves an endless stream of voters. And they can only drive the country more into the ground. So more misery. So more socialism. So more planned economy.
France "offered" fiber optic to the entire country (at taxpayers' expense) and now that people have big Internet pipes, they're going to implement Bill Gates' old dream [1]: tax every single packet of information.
What's up with France is socialism. That's what up with France.
[1] in a leaked memo when the Internet began to take off, Bill Gates explained he wanted to tax every single network packet (for those who remember).
In what sense is the internet not P2P already? If we manage to establish a signal between us, we can definitely make an internet connection without any third party.
Far too many people don't realise this. The internet only isn't P2P because of market economies of scale - like how all the bitcoins are (were) in Binance. The underlying tech is still P2P.
There is going to be a problem with everyone trying to register an address block. The internet addressing scheme isn't designed for many tiny networks and you'd have to use sub-blocks of a big block, but then someone owns the big block and gets held liable for the use of the whole block and therefore for the whole P2P system.
It actually works perfectly fine with many tiny networks, as we have been seeing with IPv4 blocks being carved up into increasingly smaller pieces. You might not be able to get a /12, but with enough cash you can for sure scrape together 2^12 discontinuous /24s, and it'll Just Work.
the underlying tech of the internet is of course P2P but there's little out there that allows us to actually establish a direct signal between us without needing to go through a bunch of centralized intermediary services. bitchat is one of the few that actually kind of manages it
Huge asymmetries both in bandwidth and capability between up and downstream. A lot of US users are still on DOCSIS, a lot of users worldwide behind CGNAT (less of an issue with IPv6), stateful firewalls for cellular to avoid creating unsolicited radio traffic. A ton of the bandwidth the average person is consuming is from talking to a caching box sitting in the ISP's DC. Basically the network you're connected to is optimized for feeding you lots of data and having you send back ACKs.
I do like the analogy that cowlevel makes with blockchains being P2P but regular centralized tech being built on top of that P2P layer. Similarly on top of the P2P internet, these intermediaries are building something less co-operative and more half-duplex.
I always found it interesting what the direction of the data has been in this dystopia, might not be signficantly interpretable (as in, "capitalism mainly uses the internet to blast propaganda and ads" instead of "capitalism uses the internet to spy on the citizens"), because the up/downstream direction of data will probably be dominated by video, so the direction only tells us which way video is going, and it makes sense that corps want to send videos, but consumers are more apprehensive about sending huge volumes of theirs.
But in general, it does seem to be that as time goes by, the corporations seem to be less interested in receiving messages, as opposed to sending messages. Maybe a decade or two ago virality was this interesting organic phenomenon that emerged and was followed by the companies, nowadays it seems to be more of them controlling what is viral and what is not, preferring to distribute a unified message.
Interestingly a tax on consumer bandwidth would not deter peering and huge volumes of traffic on the backend, so I feel it would greatly deter edge caching, which relies on reducing traffic distance instead of end-user traffic. I'd assume that at least video would be a bit less top-heavy and more indie/personal. That said, that's just video, the rest of the media forms will probably be unaffected by such a tax, 5 cents per GB is only relevant to video.
Reading through an English translation of the article, it seems there is a cap?
> There is a cap so that services using a lot of bandwidth but earning slimmer margins are not crushed. The amount charged cannot exceed 15% of revenue earned in France, or 2% of worldwide revenue. Besides raising money, the authors present the tax as ...
How much does the VideoLan foundation make from France, as revenue?
Edit: I think I've figured it out. The hosting services would need to pay, and they get taxed based on their revenue, and they would probably pass the extra cost on to their consumers, which would include non-profits like the VideoLan foundation.
How are they going to meter the traffic? Trust Netflix to report the numbers? (Pinky promise this is the true number;-)) Or request French ISP to monitor and analyze the traffic to know what went to which server?
EU and European countries are rent-seeking apparatuses whose only purpose is ensuring the status quo. Italy attempted to tax free cloud storage offered by providers such as Google, etc. to customers along with their own paid storage -- private storage is also, of course, taxed on purchase, for all hardware: from 5 to 30€ depending on capacity and intended use, because the citizen is automatically presumed to store copyrighted material on them.
The state, over time, becomes parasitic. This has always been the case.
Combined with universal suffrage and the welfare state to buy votes it is a recipe for decline and ruin.
The french state is bankrupt like all the other western democracies. They hide their pension obligations well, but that doesn’t change reality.
This system will continue to suck everything it can out of the young and the productive, because those are the incentives. There is no point at which it will stop, short of regime change.
Wait until you hear about Germany, where you have to pay a fee on all data storage media because it's possible that you might use it to copy something. It's awesome.
Edit: I apologize to the French people. I did not intend to disrespect your innovations or appropriate your legislature.
Uh, I didn't see that coming. 8Gbps is deployed on most of the territory, that's potentially 5.5 cents/s, or about 200€/hour. Probably 1 or 2 orders of magnitude too high to be painless.
Given that the content providers (CDNs) are targeted, that would incentivize p2p. P2P networks are already employed by Microsoft to distribute updates, for instance.
What about CDNs? The article mention Valve, but their traffic comes from Akamai.
In any case, I would be surprised if this law ends up being adopted.
> I would be surprised if this law ends up being adopted.
It doesnt really matter. The damage is already done.
Macron tried to turn France (unsuccessfully one might say) into a country that is open to tech businesses. This law amongst other things (record tax rates, record deficit, weak economic growth, political instability, riots and much more) is simply another signal that opening a business in France today is just too risky and this will impact future growth for sure.
You have countries that look to the future and invest in it and then you have France.
I agree with most of what you said, but just want to point out that "riots" is much dramatized and overblown by the media. for what was mostly peaceful demonstrations, with a few nefarious actors (thieves, vandals, etc) using the chaos as cover, and in practice not much happened.
Now, in my opinon, the major issue with opening a business (regardless of the country) is that it is costly to do so, even if there are tax and state incentives. It's much easier to create a startup when seed funding is available.
> "riots" is much dramatized and overblown by the media
I don't think I can agree with you on that:
> On Oct. 21, French Economy Minister Roland Lescure said in an interview that the violence and unrest had caused “tens or perhaps hundreds of millions” of euros worth of damage.
Seems like overblown is not exactly the appropriate word here. Not too mention the the loss of reputation which could keep future tourists away from France, the loss of revenue from the shops that have had to close since they did not want to be looted or burned down and finally the loss of trust in the state's ability to maintain order.
> the major issue with opening a business (regardless of the country)
Well it is especially hard in France considering the record tax rates that France is imposing on its citizens. The cost to actually employ someone is high compared to many countries in the OECD.
Furthermore, the inability to reform the state to restore competitiveness won't improve in the near future whoever wins the presidency next year.
I asked Claude for some context and while I'm hesitant to simply parrot its claims, they seem reasonable:
This passed late at night with an 11 to 10 vote (the entire assembly is 577 people). Odd amendments like this apparently pass somewhat frequently in similar ways.
Even though it passed, it's likely to be killed by the more right-wing parties when it gets to the senate.
The worst part of this is that now everybody who writes comments on Hacker News will violently insist that every company and individual in the world has to pay this tax and that you'll be in big trouble if you don't.
I've already had enough endless discussions with people saying that the US government will jail and fine US individuals on the behalf of France and Germany if they don't put cookie banners on their websites...
I mean, I always try to see things through another point of view, but 0.055 euros per GB is just crazy. GTA is estimated to be 210GB, so to download it 1 time it would cost you 11 EUR, that's more than 10% the price of the product. Politicians are completely drifting apart from reality
On the other hand, it may ensure game editors start optimizing their assets. I'm pretty sure you can optimize those 210GB into 21GB just by deleting unused files.
This sounds ridiculous. What’s the point of such a high tax on a productivity-increasing service? Why tax specific things unless you want to discourage their use?
Does the French state believe that its sole purpose is to extract money from any possible source for the sake of it?
The average French retiree makes more money annually than the average French worker (who is the one paying the retiree). Any attempts to reduce the number or benefits of the former is met with riots. The French state represents the will of the French people, which in the limit, has a single luxury French bag salesman selling to a single rich tourist a bag for $400 b which is then used to pay for that years pensions.
The sole purpose of the French state is to delay the pension time bomb however possible so someone else is in charge and held accountable when it goes off.
even if content providers are paying - it still inhibits consumption as content providers simply pass the cost to the consumer.
imagine netflix vs megaupload. megaupload or any of those or torrents - they could be registered entities or none but they r not gonna pay. consumers will simply get their content from those sites vs the official ones.
show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome as charlie munger said.
As I understand it's mostly because it doesn't matter. It's not a standalone law, it's an amendment to the budget. Budget that has close to 0 chance to pass.
I believe they did the same thing last year. Everyone did their own pet amendments, claimed victories. And then when it was time to vote for the budget with all the amendments, the assembly unanimously voted against, scraping the whole thing.
Thank you for sharing. I saw some outrage discussions on social media concerning this, and it's unfortunate how far people are willing to spin this to feed their narrative.
Seems like it massively advantages domestic French companies. If they only operate in France, they pay 2%, while YouTube pays 15%. I imagine there could be games played where a French only subsidiary pays 2% of their global income, or maybe someone sets up a French only CDN that pays the tax.
I’m French and left wing. I utterly hate these clowns. Well-meaning people with good intentions and zero subject matter expertise. This is going to achieve either misery, or nothing.
What is not left into having most of the population receiving freebies without any contribution to society? Obviously the goal by doing this is that you can pretty much get the same political ideas elected forever. Just like communists did but france was good enough not to required physical violence to achieve this. Minor a few exceptions like yellow vest protests. However its a legal hell where you can be jailed for an idea that the left doesnt like. Like for instance why isnt there a single left person that criticizes mass immigration of low level labor into a country that has 25% youth unemployement? Because it doesnt serve the system to say that.
The tax percentage is irrelevant without the context of what it pays for.
If you live in a country where you pay $400 in taxes but all healthcare is paid for by the government, you are better off than someone living in a country where they have to pay only $300 in taxes - but an additional $200 for private health insurance just to cover what you get for "free".
Is the quality and accessibility of healthcare in those countries equal? There are very few countries in which all healthcare is paid by the government and private insurance is banned. Most developed countries have a two-tier system where poor people with only the government health plan get reasonable access to essential healthcare services but often can't obtain more advanced treatments, or have to wait in long queues. Affluent people then pay for supplemental private insurance to obtain faster and higher quality services. Healthcare providers typically prioritize patients who have private insurance that pays higher rates.
You should look at government spending as a percentage of GDP instead of tax revenue. Certain governments like printing a lot of money and the effect of it isn't that different from taking that money in as taxes.
Also, I don't know if that is true in this case, but these numbers will often omit state taxes for the US and only like at federal taxes. Ie they leave the US looking better than it is.
The IMF puts the US at 37.92%, but France at 57.17%.
If you graph these values over the 20th century you should become quite worried. It turns out that a lot of our "good times" coincide with a slow but perpetual increase in this number. But this number will have to stop increasing at some point and we're reaching that point.
* Put another way, it is possible to grow out of debt. The US is the only member of the $40 trillion debt club, but is also the only member of the $32 trillion GDP club. Scott Bessent has been talking since before being named Treasury Secretary about 3/3/3. <https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/treasury-secretary-nomi...>
* Put yet another way, if you are so worried about the US, you should be sounding a five-alarm bell for France and Italy, and three alarms for most of the rest of the developed world.
This will not help enough to prevent France from being crushed by their debt. This is the beginning of the end for the eurozone. Bookmark this post for later reference.
I currently pay $0.005/GB for bandwidth, which works out to a similar amount in Euros. So this tax would constitute a tenfold cost increase to deliver data to France.
If you're paying €35/month for home internet, consuming 500 GB per month, all of which was from taxable sources, and the tax was indirectly passed on to you, you'd be paying €60/month for internet.
But at the same time the tax is capped at 15% of the providing company's French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue, and realistically speaking, not all companies would pass the tax on to the users, so it could end up being a noticeable but not catastrophic additional expense for both users and companies, if the bill passes at all, that is.
[OP] nick486 | 15 hours ago
andsoitis | 11 hours ago
benhurmarcel | 10 hours ago
motbus3 | 15 hours ago
zomtorg | 15 hours ago
timcobb | 14 hours ago
asfodelsu | 13 hours ago
well_ackshually | 15 hours ago
cmiles8 | 15 hours ago
Maybe focus on the riots in the streets and sort that out vs wasting energy on nonsense like this. Just saying.
antisthenes | 15 hours ago
I guess at least it's capped somewhat? Is there more background preceding this legislation?
This seems as ridiculous as having 1TB internet caps for residential ISPs in 2026.
[OP] nick486 | 15 hours ago
netsharc | 15 hours ago
Dear Netflix, my startup is Uber but for carrier pigeons. Carrying SD cards! With AI-optimized routing because I gotta mention AI somewhere...
jauntywundrkind | 15 hours ago
It feels absurd to punish data heavy companies. What a weird proxy disciminator. Makes so little sense.
Also though, perhaps we see YouTube and others not just adopting & making available but pushing AV2 much faster! "YouTube AV2 streams will be available for Web as soon as early 2027." And perhaps resolutions dropping precipitously too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50244283 http://aomedia.org/press%20releases/AOMedia-Rapid-AV2-Adopti...
rdm_blackhole | 15 hours ago
This is part of the net-0 narrative and the degrowth movement that's been growing(no pun intended) in Europe. Nevermind that growth in the EU is already pretty low to begin with...
cowlevel | 13 hours ago
jauntywundrkind | 9 hours ago
In the spirit of radical misunderstanding I assume this ridiculous proposition is continuing to be foisted upon people. A "Badhearts Law" (riffing Goodheart's "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") if you will: finding a bad measure to make bad accusations.
(The idea that AI is going to pay a heavy tax or even medium tax for this seems like some super wishful thinking.)
baal80spam | 15 hours ago
Does anyone really believe that said content providers won't pass this to their customers?
eastbound | 15 hours ago
samfriedman | 14 hours ago
rlpb | 11 hours ago
I don't know if this is one of those cases but governments are generally trying to figure out how to avoid such transfers away of tax revenue.
8note | 11 hours ago
that could be done directly by taxing IP licensing directly
Youden | 15 hours ago
downrightmike | 15 hours ago
Then there is the whole "they literally never decolonized out of africa" just to keep the economy going this long and that is unable to be exploited like in the past.
They cut the kid's programs to the bone and the kids told them in the most french way possible that that was bad. Inequality has been worse than 1789 for years now.
greyw | 14 hours ago
Dont see that working in the long run
cowlevel | 13 hours ago
nradov | 11 hours ago
sidewndr46 | 15 hours ago
lurking_swe | 15 hours ago
A tax is usually applied to help facilitate maintenance for something you are using. Or to disincentivize "bad" behavior. For example i pay taxes in the US that directly help pay for public schools, the fire department, roads, etc.
How does the french government bear any cost if i download data from a data center? What bad behavior is disincentivezed with this tax?
epistasis | 15 hours ago
malux85 | 15 hours ago
Oh yeah you also have to not kill the population economically. What about the citizens who are doing large scale research on datasets? Those are the ones who are going to make billion dollar companies and they wont happen if they are watching the meter all the time because the government has decided to tax thought, so better not think too much!
28304283409234 | 14 hours ago
nradov | 11 hours ago
well_ackshually | 14 hours ago
Note that this amendment to the law was passed with 11 votes for, 10 no... With a national assembly of 577. I have to assume it was voted at night, that's when peak democracy happens.
Aerroon | 11 hours ago
martinohansen | 11 hours ago
Modified3019 | 14 hours ago
What’s more fun is that while france is teetering on the brink, it’s hardly alone, and it’s collapse will tip the dominoes.
Something to look forward to, I guess.
mitxela | 13 hours ago
gib444 | 12 hours ago
See ~2008 onwards:
https://countryeconomy.com/national-debt/france
https://countryeconomy.com/national-debt/uk
It can be our children's problem !
pjc50 | 11 hours ago
It's not great, but it's not even clearly worse than the situation Greece survived. https://think.ing.com/articles/carsten-intro/
BobaFloutist | 3 hours ago
Be fair, sometimes it's communist revolution.
MadrasThorn | 13 hours ago
TacticalCoder | 11 hours ago
One economist wrote, before the first Euro even circulated: "The euro will lead to too many public servants in France, too many industries in Germany, too many vacation houses in Spain [1], the default of Spain on its public debt and then the default of Greece on its public debt".
When Greece, not Spain, defaulted on its public debt, that same economist: "I was only wrong about the order of defaults of Greece and Spain".
The Euro, he predicted, would be one of the shortest lived currency in the history of currencies.
His name is Charles Gave and he's gotta be 80 y/o old now. Of course people are going to hate on him and spill all their hatred on him because he's neither a communism nor a socialist.
And then idiots are going to say that "euro is great because I can travel and pay in the same currency everywhere". As if they're own little convenience warranted the disaster that we're heading into because ideologues, not economists, decided to force a currency down the throat of most european citizens.
[1] btw there are many protests in Spain now because "costs of rents are too high" (yeah, no shit: there's a gigantic number of empty houses and apartment in Spain belonging to foreigners, who only come a few weeks per year).
thevinter | 24 minutes ago
sublinear | 11 hours ago
California, for example.
nradov | 11 hours ago
sublinear | 11 hours ago
I probably should have quoted this part too. I was replying to the whole comment about the changing winds of politics. The economics is just one of the symptoms.
TacticalCoder | 11 hours ago
I kept posting about it here over the years but at officially 57% of the GDP being public spending (and the actual percentage is bigger than that because a great many of the "private" companies that are monopolies are basically owned by state apparatchiks), France is already a planned economy.
And there's only one outcome for planned economies and its misery.
And when socialists succeed in establishing misery, they've guaranteed themselves an endless stream of voters. And they can only drive the country more into the ground. So more misery. So more socialism. So more planned economy.
France "offered" fiber optic to the entire country (at taxpayers' expense) and now that people have big Internet pipes, they're going to implement Bill Gates' old dream [1]: tax every single packet of information.
What's up with France is socialism. That's what up with France.
[1] in a leaked memo when the Internet began to take off, Bill Gates explained he wanted to tax every single network packet (for those who remember).
ObnoxiousProxy | 15 hours ago
TZubiri | 15 hours ago
cowlevel | 13 hours ago
There is going to be a problem with everyone trying to register an address block. The internet addressing scheme isn't designed for many tiny networks and you'd have to use sub-blocks of a big block, but then someone owns the big block and gets held liable for the use of the whole block and therefore for the whole P2P system.
crote | 11 hours ago
ObnoxiousProxy | 12 hours ago
hnav | 11 hours ago
TZubiri | 10 hours ago
I always found it interesting what the direction of the data has been in this dystopia, might not be signficantly interpretable (as in, "capitalism mainly uses the internet to blast propaganda and ads" instead of "capitalism uses the internet to spy on the citizens"), because the up/downstream direction of data will probably be dominated by video, so the direction only tells us which way video is going, and it makes sense that corps want to send videos, but consumers are more apprehensive about sending huge volumes of theirs.
But in general, it does seem to be that as time goes by, the corporations seem to be less interested in receiving messages, as opposed to sending messages. Maybe a decade or two ago virality was this interesting organic phenomenon that emerged and was followed by the companies, nowadays it seems to be more of them controlling what is viral and what is not, preferring to distribute a unified message.
Interestingly a tax on consumer bandwidth would not deter peering and huge volumes of traffic on the backend, so I feel it would greatly deter edge caching, which relies on reducing traffic distance instead of end-user traffic. I'd assume that at least video would be a bit less top-heavy and more indie/personal. That said, that's just video, the rest of the media forms will probably be unaffected by such a tax, 5 cents per GB is only relevant to video.
iamnothere | 15 hours ago
rdm_blackhole | 15 hours ago
Not saying that this is not a stupid law nonetheless.
miohtama | 15 hours ago
https://x.com/videolan/status/2116229135919919278?a=5Ua5pSOr...
quicon | 14 hours ago
0x_rs | 14 hours ago
get.videolan.org
Flere-Imsaho | 13 hours ago
Either very, it this tax story is true, it is completely rediculous and signifies complete desparation by France.
pan69 | 14 hours ago
orangecat | 13 hours ago
See "tax incidence". Sales taxes are paid by businesses, and yet.
ccapitalK | 10 hours ago
> There is a cap so that services using a lot of bandwidth but earning slimmer margins are not crushed. The amount charged cannot exceed 15% of revenue earned in France, or 2% of worldwide revenue. Besides raising money, the authors present the tax as ...
How much does the VideoLan foundation make from France, as revenue?
Edit: I think I've figured it out. The hosting services would need to pay, and they get taxed based on their revenue, and they would probably pass the extra cost on to their consumers, which would include non-profits like the VideoLan foundation.
monk_grilla | 10 hours ago
wmf | 10 hours ago
hommelix | 15 hours ago
well_ackshually | 15 hours ago
0x_rs | 15 hours ago
MrBuddyCasino | 15 hours ago
Combined with universal suffrage and the welfare state to buy votes it is a recipe for decline and ruin.
The french state is bankrupt like all the other western democracies. They hide their pension obligations well, but that doesn’t change reality.
This system will continue to suck everything it can out of the young and the productive, because those are the incentives. There is no point at which it will stop, short of regime change.
BobaFloutist | 3 hours ago
elpocko | 15 hours ago
Edit: I apologize to the French people. I did not intend to disrespect your innovations or appropriate your legislature.
pingou | 14 hours ago
rdm_blackhole | 14 hours ago
tuetuopay | 14 hours ago
dethos | 13 hours ago
MayeulC | 15 hours ago
Given that the content providers (CDNs) are targeted, that would incentivize p2p. P2P networks are already employed by Microsoft to distribute updates, for instance.
What about CDNs? The article mention Valve, but their traffic comes from Akamai.
In any case, I would be surprised if this law ends up being adopted.
rdm_blackhole | 14 hours ago
It doesnt really matter. The damage is already done.
Macron tried to turn France (unsuccessfully one might say) into a country that is open to tech businesses. This law amongst other things (record tax rates, record deficit, weak economic growth, political instability, riots and much more) is simply another signal that opening a business in France today is just too risky and this will impact future growth for sure.
You have countries that look to the future and invest in it and then you have France.
MayeulC | 13 hours ago
Now, in my opinon, the major issue with opening a business (regardless of the country) is that it is costly to do so, even if there are tax and state incentives. It's much easier to create a startup when seed funding is available.
rdm_blackhole | 2 hours ago
I don't think I can agree with you on that:
> On Oct. 21, French Economy Minister Roland Lescure said in an interview that the violence and unrest had caused “tens or perhaps hundreds of millions” of euros worth of damage.
Seems like overblown is not exactly the appropriate word here. Not too mention the the loss of reputation which could keep future tourists away from France, the loss of revenue from the shops that have had to close since they did not want to be looted or burned down and finally the loss of trust in the state's ability to maintain order.
> the major issue with opening a business (regardless of the country)
Well it is especially hard in France considering the record tax rates that France is imposing on its citizens. The cost to actually employ someone is high compared to many countries in the OECD.
Furthermore, the inability to reform the state to restore competitiveness won't improve in the near future whoever wins the presidency next year.
elikoga | 15 hours ago
Youden | 15 hours ago
This passed late at night with an 11 to 10 vote (the entire assembly is 577 people). Odd amendments like this apparently pass somewhat frequently in similar ways.
Even though it passed, it's likely to be killed by the more right-wing parties when it gets to the senate.
carlosjobim | 15 hours ago
I've already had enough endless discussions with people saying that the US government will jail and fine US individuals on the behalf of France and Germany if they don't put cookie banners on their websites...
johen8 | 15 hours ago
sgt | 15 hours ago
xyzsparetimexyz | 14 hours ago
eastbound | 14 hours ago
dinkblam | 14 hours ago
well_ackshually | 14 hours ago
That said, we do have the Germans as neighbours who are pretty damn skilled too.
mikewarot | 12 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
maxdo | 14 hours ago
lousken | 14 hours ago
joegibbs | 14 hours ago
Does the French state believe that its sole purpose is to extract money from any possible source for the sake of it?
TMWNN | 11 hours ago
Yes. French taxes are 43.5% of GDP in 2024, the second highest among OECD countries. <https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/oecd-taxes-share-gdp> US is 25.6%; Germany is 38%; Britain is 34.4%; Canada is 34.9%.
arjie | 11 hours ago
_--__--__ | 11 hours ago
dzonga | 14 hours ago
even if content providers are paying - it still inhibits consumption as content providers simply pass the cost to the consumer.
imagine netflix vs megaupload. megaupload or any of those or torrents - they could be registered entities or none but they r not gonna pay. consumers will simply get their content from those sites vs the official ones.
show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome as charlie munger said.
tgv | 14 hours ago
Leherenn | 14 hours ago
I believe they did the same thing last year. Everyone did their own pet amendments, claimed victories. And then when it was time to vote for the budget with all the amendments, the assembly unanimously voted against, scraping the whole thing.
cowlevel | 13 hours ago
monk_grilla | 10 hours ago
xpct | 9 hours ago
cameldrv | 13 hours ago
em-bee | 13 hours ago
tetrisgm | 13 hours ago
constantius | 11 hours ago
tetrisgm | 11 hours ago
retinaros | 11 hours ago
tetrisgm | 11 hours ago
retinaros | 11 hours ago
monneyboi | 12 hours ago
crote | 11 hours ago
dymk | 11 hours ago
kingo55 | 11 hours ago
thrance | 12 hours ago
CodeWriter23 | 12 hours ago
TMWNN | 11 hours ago
crote | 11 hours ago
If you live in a country where you pay $400 in taxes but all healthcare is paid for by the government, you are better off than someone living in a country where they have to pay only $300 in taxes - but an additional $200 for private health insurance just to cover what you get for "free".
nradov | 11 hours ago
Aerroon | 11 hours ago
Also, I don't know if that is true in this case, but these numbers will often omit state taxes for the US and only like at federal taxes. Ie they leave the US looking better than it is.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
The IMF puts the US at 37.92%, but France at 57.17%.
If you graph these values over the 20th century you should become quite worried. It turns out that a lot of our "good times" coincide with a slow but perpetual increase in this number. But this number will have to stop increasing at some point and we're reaching that point.
TMWNN | 11 hours ago
From the article:
>Total tax revenues (federal, state, and local) as a percentage of GDP for OECD countries.
>If you graph these values over the 20th century you should become quite worried.
I agree that US debt is a real issue. But:
* The data indicates that, if necessary, the US has a (lot) more room to raise taxes.
* US GDP grew by 3.4% <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/business/economy/us-econo...> in 3Q2026, beating estimates. French GDP shrank by 0.1% <https://www.france24.com/en/business/20261030-french-economy...> in 3Q2026, worse than estimates.
* Put another way, it is possible to grow out of debt. The US is the only member of the $40 trillion debt club, but is also the only member of the $32 trillion GDP club. Scott Bessent has been talking since before being named Treasury Secretary about 3/3/3. <https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/treasury-secretary-nomi...>
* Put yet another way, if you are so worried about the US, you should be sounding a five-alarm bell for France and Italy, and three alarms for most of the rest of the developed world.
dmitrygr | 11 hours ago
yoannl | 11 hours ago
dabinat | 11 hours ago
retinaros | 11 hours ago
wmf | 11 hours ago
aucisson_masque | 11 hours ago
dumberquestions | 11 hours ago
But at the same time the tax is capped at 15% of the providing company's French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue, and realistically speaking, not all companies would pass the tax on to the users, so it could end up being a noticeable but not catastrophic additional expense for both users and companies, if the bill passes at all, that is.