What the French Gigabyte Tax Would Cost: GTA 6, Netflix, Football and More

Jump to: Build a basket · A football match · Your household · Who would pay · What happens next

01What France Voted For

The tax is aimed at companies, not people. Internet providers would count how much data each sender delivers to their customers, report anonymized totals every quarter, and the tax authority would bill the senders. The text bars any record of what the data is or who received it. It sets no minimum size and no exemptions, so a French public broadcaster or a free nonprofit app would be taxed on the same terms as Netflix. It also gives no start date; as part of the 2027 budget it would, in my reading, apply from 2027 if it survived.

How to read the numbers below. Every example multiplies the data transferred by €0.055 a gigabyte, before company-level revenue caps. The results show the proposal's gross charge on that data: not a consumer bill, and not a prediction of what any company would end up paying, since a company that hits its cap owes nothing more for extra downloads. Whether any of it shows up in a subscription price or a game's price depends on the companies. Streaming figures use Netflix's published maximum rates (up to 3 GB an hour in HD and 7 GB in 4K), and game sizes are mostly the install sizes on Steam store pages, which stand in for the download. A gigabyte here is 1 billion bytes, the measure internet providers, Netflix and Steam use. Dollar figures use about $1.12 to the euro, the late-October 2026 rate.

02The Price Tag Wall

Each tag shows the size of one download or one viewing and the gross charge on it at €0.055 a gigabyte, before company-level caps. Tap any tag to add it to the basket; tap again to take it out. The games are the eye-openers: a single new release can carry a bigger charge than a month of Netflix in HD at two hours a night.

Game sizes are install sizes from each Steam store listing, read October 30, 2026, unless noted; the download itself can be somewhat smaller because Steam compresses it. GTA 6 is the reported PlayStation 5 size. Streaming uses Netflix's published data rates. Every source is in the full price list in section 5 and in the sources at the end.

03The Download Bar

Pick a game and press download. The bar fills at the speed of the tax: every gigabyte that lands adds 5.5 euro cents to what the store would owe. For GTA 6, with a release date of November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox, even buyers of the boxed edition download the game: Rockstar confirmed the box holds a download code, not a disc. GTA 6 is here to show the charge on a download of that size if the proposal took effect; it is not a claim that its November 2026 launch would be taxed. Most other sizes are Steam install sizes, so the actual download can be smaller; enter your own figure if you have one.

Six games side by side

Bars are scaled to GTA 6's reported 210 GB. Each reinstall, new device or large patch is another download and, under the amendment, another tax bill for the sender.

04The Matchday Meter

A football broadcast runs about two hours once you count the build-up, halftime and stoppage time. French broadcasters do not publish how much data a match uses, so I used Netflix's published rates for the same picture quality. Real streams vary: one test of a DAZN match at top quality measured about 1.6 GB an hour, about half Netflix's HD rate, while 4K sport at 50 frames a second can run higher. Treat these as round benchmarks, not measurements. Choose a quality and press kickoff.

A season's worth

In HD, at 2 hours and 3 GB an hour a match. Ligue 1 has 18 clubs and 34 rounds; the 2026 World Cup had 104 matches; the Champions League league phase is 8 matches a club. For comparison, DAZN's data-saver mode uses about 0.4 GB an hour.

05From a Song to GTA 6

The range is the point. A song is a few megabytes and its tax is a small fraction of a euro cent. A big game is tens of thousands of times larger. On a scale where each step is ten times the last, everything people do online fits on one line, and the games sit at the far right with nothing else near them.

Each gridline is ten times the one before. Tax at €0.055 a gigabyte.

The full price list

06Your Household, by the Month

Set the sliders to match your home. The defaults land near 250 GB a month, close to the regulator Arcep's latest average for homes on a 4G or 5G box (248 GB in the second quarter of 2026). Arcep does not publish a per-line average for fiber, and heavy fiber homes use far more. The result is the tax the senders would owe on the data delivered to your home, not a bill you would receive.

Against the averages

Video at Netflix's 1, 3 and 7 GB an hour for SD, HD and 4K; a football match is 2 hours; calls at Zoom's 1080p rate of 1.35 GB an hour; music at 320 kbit/s; a month is 30 days. Arcep figures are from its Q2 2026 market observatory, published October 8, 2026. The 500 GB household is an example cited by Univers Freebox.

07The Receipt

Here is the same idea as a till receipt for one month online. Change any quantity and the receipt reprices itself. Try adding one copy of GTA 6 at the bottom.

08Who Would Pay

The sponsors justified the tax with a single number: about 200 billion gigabytes a year reach French subscribers, they said, citing Arcep, and roughly half of it comes from five companies. Arcep's own 2025 figures back up the second part. The rows below split the gross tax by Arcep's shares of traffic. Switch the yearly volume to see how much the starting assumption matters.

Shares of traffic delivered to subscribers of France's main internet providers in 2025, from Arcep's 2026 interconnection barometer; bars are scaled to the "everyone else" group. Gross means before the revenue caps, which would cut these amounts sharply. The 117 billion GB scenario is mine and rests on an assumption: it applies Arcep's 248 GB average for 4G/5G boxes to all 33.1 million home connections and adds mobile data. Fiber homes probably use more, but Arcep does not publish their average.

Why €10 billion is a stretch

The amendment's own justification says it would raise €10 billion a year. That sits just under the €11 billion gross you get from the sponsors' 200 billion gigabytes, which leaves almost no room for the caps. The caps are where the number falls apart. Netflix's share alone is about €1.28 billion gross, but the tax could not exceed 15% of its French revenue (which Netflix does not disclose) or 2% of its worldwide revenue, depending on how the cap is read. Akamai is the bigger problem: the text appears to count a delivery network's whole outflow as its own, so Akamai would be taxed on the traffic it carries for game stores, software makers and app companies, while its cap would be worked out on Akamai's own, much smaller, French revenue. That is my reading of the text; nobody has published an official interpretation.

The government's objection pointed the other way. David Amiel told the Assembly that about half of the yield would fall not on the giants but on smaller content providers, including French ones. The text has no threshold, so they would be caught at the first gigabyte. VideoLAN, the Paris-based nonprofit behind the VLC media player, said on October 30 that the tax would cost it more than €1 million a year, which at this rate implies about 18 million gigabytes of downloads to French users. Laurent Lhardit, for his part, said carrying TF1's five channels on internet boxes would cost the broadcaster about €200,000 to €300,000 a year. As of October 30, 2026, neither the €10 billion claim nor the government's estimate came with a published costing.

09What a Euro Buys

Turn the rate around and one euro of tax covers about 18 gigabytes. Move the slider to see what a given amount of tax would cover.

Each square is one unit (one hour, one match, one copy); a partly filled square is a fraction of one. The Spotify row shows one square per 10 hours. At most 60 squares are drawn per row.

10What Happens Next

An amendment adopted at first reading is a long way from a tax. This one sits in the revenue half of the 2027 budget bill, and that half still has to pass the Assembly as a whole. If it fails, the government's original text, without the tax, goes to the Senate. The Senate, where the center-right Les Républicains lead the majority, is not expected to keep it, and differences between the two chambers then go to a joint committee.

• Article 49.3. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has promised to avoid forcing the budget through without a vote unless Parliament obstructs it, but the Assembly's president, Yaël Braun-Pivet, urged him on October 27 to use 49.3. Under 49.3 the government picks which adopted amendments stay in the text, so it could simply leave this one out.
• The clock. The constitution gives the Assembly 40 days for its first reading and Parliament 70 days in all, which by one calculation run to about November 17 and December 17, 2026. If Parliament has not decided by then, the government can enact the budget by ordinance.
• The courts. If the tax survived, a challenge at the Conseil constitutionnel would be all but certain. The open questions are obvious: the missing threshold, the delivery-network rule and a cap that does not say which limit applies.

There is a recent precedent for amendments like this one fading away. In the 2026 budget cycle, the Assembly rejected the whole bill in November 2025, and many tax amendments adopted on the floor died with it; the budget was finally passed in early 2026 with three uses of 49.3.

The idea is not new, but France's version is unusual. European telecom operators have spent years asking for big traffic senders to pay networks directly, and in January 2026 the European Commission's Digital Networks Act proposal declined to impose such fees. The French tax would send the money to the state instead of the networks. South Korea is the closest real test of charging senders for traffic: after it moved to a "sending party pays" rule between internet providers in 2016, Facebook switched off a cache inside one provider and latency for some users more than quadrupled, and Twitch left the country in February 2024, citing network costs it called prohibitively expensive.

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§Sources

• The amendment: Amendment I-1358, Assemblée nationale (filed October 9, 2026); committee version I-CF365
• The vote and the debate, October 30, 2026: Next; Univers Freebox; Clubic; KultureGeek; Politique Matin
• Next steps: iPhoneSoft (October 30, 2026); Le Club des Juristes (October 12, 2026); budget calendar; Selexium on the 2026 budget
• VideoLAN: post on X (October 30, 2026)
• Arcep: market observatory, Q2 2026 (October 8, 2026); interconnection barometer 2026 (2025 data)
• GTA 6: Push Square (October 27, 2026); IBTimes (October 28, 2026); VGC on the boxed edition
• Game sizes: Steam store listings, read October 30, 2026; the Minecraft store FAQ on minecraft.net, read October 30, 2026; PCGamesN on Fortnite; Univers Simu
• Streaming and calls: Netflix help center; Spotify audio quality; Android Authority on YouTube; Zoom bandwidth; DAZN; TuttoTech DAZN test
• Updates: All Things How on iOS 26 update sizes (September 15, 2025); Windows Latest on Windows 11 cumulative update sizes (April 29, 2026)
• Elsewhere: Internet Society on South Korea; TechRadar on Twitch; The Sun (Malaysia) on the Digital Networks Act (January 21, 2026)
• Exchange rate: EUR/USD history (1.117 at the October 27, 2026 close)