levelsio says France passed a tax of 0.055 euros per gigabyte

levelsio posted that a French tax on internet traffic he had assumed was only a proposal actually passed. The rate he cites is 0.055 euros per gigabyte on all internet traffic.

@levelsio

@levelsio

X

I thought it was just a proposal, but it actually passed

The report he quotes, from Pulse Monde, says deputies adopted an amendment to tax producers of digital data at 5.5 centimes per gigabyte transmitted, sourced to the Assemblée nationale and tagged Budget 2027. The stated target in that post is up to 10 billion euros a year. It names Netflix, YouTube, cloud and dematerialised games as services that could be covered, and flags the risk that the cost gets passed through to consumer prices.

What is actually confirmed

An adopted amendment is not the same thing as a finished law, and neither levelsio nor the post he quotes walks through what happens next. So the honest version is that a chamber voted for a per-gigabyte levy with a 10 billion euro revenue ambition attached, and nobody in these sources says where it lands after that.

The number is the part worth sitting with. At 5.5 cents a gigabyte, the cost scales with bytes moved rather than revenue earned, which is an unusual shape for a tax. Video is the obvious target, but the same meter runs over cloud storage, file delivery and anything inference-heavy that ships large payloads. If you serve French users and your unit economics are built on bandwidth being close to free, that assumption now has a line item attached to it, at least in draft.

The second shoe

A day later levelsio followed up with a Polymarket post saying a German minister proposes a new tax on all economic value created by AI. His read is that European governments will keep taking more from foreign companies because they are running short of money for pensions and the welfare state, and he adds planned wealth taxes and exit taxes on Europeans who try to leave, which he says are already active in many EU countries.

@levelsio

@levelsio

X

Europe is running out of money

That last part is his opinion, not a reported fact, and he offers no figures behind it. What he does have is two tax stories in two days pointing the same direction, which is why the thread caught.

For a solo founder the practical question is narrow. If the levy survives into law as written, the people who pay are the ones whose product is bytes rather than seats. Worth knowing before you price your next tier.