Not just video streaming. Think of game downloads, software updates, video calls, cloud storage, backups.
A GTA 6 download is estimated to be 210 GB. Under this law the publisher or storefront will have to pay an extra 11.5 EUR per copy in tax. And not just for a sale, but for every download.
Got the latest Apple security update? Think about whether it is really worth paying a couple bucks to install it.
Video streaming platforms are not generally running on a pay-per-view monetization model. A few offer this, but the vast majority of them are offering it at $15-20/months for unlimited streaming. 4K video uses quite a bit of bandwidth. Low end is something like 15Mbps. That’s ~7GB/hour. Or, $0.385/hour at these proposed rates. Doesn’t take long to start approaching the cost of the streaming services charge.
And for households with kids, it's easy to imagine that turning into 30 hours a month, or $12 by your reasonable estimate. That's not a huge number, but I'm sure that'd push almost any streaming service into negative territory. I don't know what the average service's profit margins are, but highly doubt any of them could absorb that kind of hit.
What if you're paying a few EUR a month for unlimited streaming on some app, not high profit new movies? The profit they make per episode for some rerurn of some old show you binge is probably a few cents at best.
This is the most hilarious thing I have ever read. Part of me wants this law to go into effect just to watch an entire country send itself back to 1988 to try and compy with it.
Summary of n°I-1358:
- It's a tax on internet "content", but they haven't defined what that means exactly, so by default it would apply to all internet traffic.
- Bytes delivered to French users by ISPs are taxed (but not user uploads).
- ISPs are responsible for tracking exactly where every GB originates from and will have to report the names to the government.
- The "content provider" then has to pay 0.055 EUR per GB that they sent.
- No explanation for how user-to-user traffic is handled. No explanation for what ISP -> user means (e.g. does P2P count)? No details on how ISPs will track the upstream source. About a million other similar questions are unanswered.
- The amendment was adopted today, and the assembly will vote on it as part of their full budget (but there are still many stages left before it can become law). Even by government standards this is way too idiotic to actually come into effect.
Why not implement it via the ISP? the isp just bills the customer 0.055eur per GB downstream, and remits the tax collected to the govt?
yes, somewhat sarcastic - but the point being, they DID seem to understand the stupidity, and thus the long-way around approach: ISP -> classifies the origin and reports to govt -> then presumably govt sends a tax notice to the origin?
They desperately would like to but each time they tried, the population anger forced them to back off any proposal.
If you do it at the ISP level, it is very obvious that it is the consumer that will pay because the monthly bill will increase of the same amount.
This is why you have the current proposal, because in their twisted mind, the rich digital giants will foot the bill of any tax without the customer paying anything.
The parliamentary responsible for that even said "the customer will not pay anything because Facebook is free".
To be noted that there are also to additional factor pushing for that on the political side:
- Here we have "unlimited" plan on almost anything, and ISP have to compete so no one can go back to "per-giga" plan to be able to extract more income. So ISP are lobbying hard for such laws that could allow them to have a good excuse to stop unlimited plans all at the same time.
- The political group that are pushing that are quite retarded, and they have an ecological agenda that is totally unscientific. And so they are really like thinking that they act for the environment because when you watch a youtube video dolphins are dying and if you have thousands of emails in your mailbox, you pollute as much as doing a round trip flight between Paris and NewYork. So consuming "data" is bad because it is like consuming physical products...
France, like every EU country, is desperate to tax internet companies, because they can't currently. But, internet is largely ad-sponsored and even tiny taxes would destroy the business model.
The way this tax looks it just means you have to exclude French people from the internet. This won't work.
1) fully not-in-France remote businesses like SAAS companies
2) ad-supported business (e.g. tax Google, but not the ads they sell in France, but all the impressions they get (and pay out to someone else or to themselves) due to French people)
You see what I mean. Tax both sides, like they already do for French companies in France.
They should tax ads then. Since that's the source of money that fuels everything they should tax at the source.
Make the companies report how many ads they run, how much they get paid on that and tax that.
You won't catch them all initially but you'll catch some and then you can gradually tighten the system.
And this will go far enough from the consumer that he might actually not notice. Ad budgets of companies are very flexible and if you hit all of them, they'll all just reduce their ad spending at no harm to anyone.
That's what they're trying to do. The problem is that the person paying for the ads is not in France (and has no presence in the EU at all), and the person in France isn't paying for the service (like Google search, or ChatGPT), so there "is nothing to tax".
https://pastebin.com/zHkErGHP google translated version of article explains that the tax is not on any specific type of data but on any data delivered to french citizens/corps.
I don't have VideoLan's internal metrics, but if they're saying it'll cost them millions they're saying they deliver over ~18tb (or ~36tb for a tax of 2million) to french peeps per year
Because it's the actual generator of the bits that is supposed to pay. Which means you let a French person download anything at all, you're supposed to pay. If someone downloads your software from a mirror, the mirror can "identify you", and you'll be charged. No matter where you are.
This is supposed to let the French tax authorities collect 20B in additional tax revenue.
And yes, I don't see how Youtube (or Facebook, or Tiktok, or Netflix, or even something like Steam ...) can operate with such a tax in France.
If I upload to a french server from a ukranian server that I seed through a swiss based VPN using a norwegian seedbox that I paid a friend for in cash, how does the french government bill me? Do they subpoena the ukranian server to see where the data come from? Does the swiss government, not seeing any legal issue with my data, comply and hand over my norwegian server? Does the norwegian seedbox provider or my friend at the company foot the bill because they've no record of me?
What about networking stacks in which the requester can't necessarily identify where the data genuinely originated? Suppose I torrent a genuine Linux ISO in france. Do all of the peers get fractional bills? Or is it on the distro maintainer? What if the data didn't really originate from any of the peers but was fetched for me by the peers and the peers don't tell me (or therefore the ISPs) where they got the data from?
What if I put, say, VLC in an encrpyted zip. The ISP and therefore the french gov would see this as data coming from me since it doesn't hash as VLC, but they also can't prove that it came from me if I demonstrate that it was actually downloaded from a forum.
What about anonymous data? If 4chan is mirroring images for me that I uploaded from a McDonalds and a french frog downloads it, how do I get a bill? Does 4chan eat the bill or forward it to the McDonalds? Does the McDonalds eat the bill or hire a tech to cross-reference cameras and IP logs? What if I paid for the food in cash? Do they check some mythical "who owns this laptop" database provided by google/meta/microsoft? What if my laptop isn't in those databases? The local McDonalds is forced to foot the bill as they can't provide a patsie?
If I send a friend a video on via facebook messenger, who foots the bill? Facebook didn't send the data, I did. Is facebook going to rewrite it's eula to allow them to bill me for "woops your friend was in france at the time"?
This may all seem like hand-waving what-aboutism, but there are legitimate questions at hand. If public data is expensive and there are routes that do not result in billing, why would anyone choose the expensive route for any reason other than ignorance of the free route? If those who know would choose the free route, how is france going to collect all, most, or any of their booty?
Most of what you say is called tax evasion. The rest of your questions are far too complicated legally to answer, but many governments cooperate to prevent it. I might also mention it's criminal (meaning you get locked up if you get caught, you don't just have to pay). So I'd say you run a pretty big risk.
But in general, I must say that's something I really wonder about. Because what Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) did was also very large scale violation of copyright law, with technically even also includes tax evasion (they didn't pay authors, and had they paid them, they would have had to registers VAT on that amount). And they did it before that became legal, so they took a risk that could have resulted in very very large criminal sentences. And now we're of course seeing that the justice system isn't fair and won't destroy billionnaires just because they commit large scale violation of the law. But I do wonder: how do you decide to do this. Copyright violations have gotten sentences of up to 2 months plus 50,000 in damages PER INFRACTION. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Bill Gates all had their companies commit literally hundreds of millions of infractions against these laws to get their models started, knowing full well it was illegal ... AFTERWARDS congress has declared it's kind-of allowed (yes, really via a specific organization so that congress can claim they didn't do anything, but it was congress power being used to do it) ... but ... 50000 times hundreds of millions ... if congress had acted differently the punishments would have destroyed any billionnaire's fortune. How do you take such a risk? I don't understand.
Clearly: billionnaires get protected and small authors (frankly even quite big ones) got universally fucked. That's the net effect and 100% intentional. What I can't understand is WHY. If this had been put up to a democratic vote, it seems to me guaranteed billionnaires would have been convicted.
Btw: BOTH US AND EU have declared it legal, which I also wonder how that happens. But please don't start with "that's how the US works", or "of course Trump". I mean I see that too, but every important country leader could have stopped that change, including pretty far leftist figures like Pedro Sanchez could have stopped the EU from accepting this. They didn't.
This is an exceedingly dumb tax. A more reasonable tax would be one for storing user data. That would make PII a liability, not something you hold on to forever in hopes of selling to some scammy third party when you fold.
Social spending is redistributive, it reduces wealth inequalities. Shrink it and you make the actual issue worse. I guarantee you this 5% we recover wouldn't be used to balance the budget, but to grant another tax cut to the wealthy. And let's not even mention the consequences of cutting 1/20th of total social spending on human lives, this spending is not just a frivolous expense we can cut in when needed. We've been doing neoliberalism for 50 years, maybe it's time we cut our losses and find something better?
I don't have an X account, so I can't see the conversation, but there don't appear to be any carveouts for non-profits or small businesses in the amendment, unless perhaps "any company offering an internet access service to households and businesses" has more criteria in context than a simple reading would suggest.
I wonder how distribution via torrent would be accounted for. Or if it would be worth it for larger players to adopt such a model, or just pay up or exit France.
I haven't done french since high school. So totally chatgpt and google translate reading this to me, but I really don't get what VideoLAN has to do with this.
The law is crazy with a €55/TB tax on ingress to France (including local cdns). But it's got nothing to do with your video player.
> A tax is established based on the flows of digital data emitted by content providers and paid by the latter
> When a data emitter uses a content delivery network to cache content near end users, the amount of data emitted is considered equal to the sum of the outgoing flows from the delivery network
Imagine paying €8 to download Balder's gate 3 lol.
the text menstions several times that internet providers are the one in charge of collecting and paying the tax, i don't see how the softwares enabling the streaming/download would be under threat?
I think the key terms to note here are: "content and applications providers" (translation's mine). The law seems to only apply to those companies producing both, which should leave VideoLan out of the picture. French can be a bit ambiguous sometimes (as English maybe), here there are 2 possible readings in French:
- content providers and application providers
- providers of both content and applications
I don't think that the first interpretation has a leg though, because of the remaining of the text.
This was expected. France is in a lot of debt trouble and it’s highly alarming development for Eurozone. Unlike the US, France cannot print more Euros to stay afloat and the ECB, who can, is institutionally hand-cuffed to not do so. Its chief just quit in a seemingly related situation but optically unrelated way.
Just to clarify: Christine Lagarde hasn't quit as in quit today, rather, she announced she will resign in February, 9 months before the end of her term.
Laffer curve is about percentages (and also irrelevant below 80-90% and irrelevant if you think government shouldn't be a business). Taxing people with zero money millions of dollars isn't even on the curve, it's just a completely separate bad thing.
The separate internet tax on the other hand, that's about 1000% of the cost of internet, and a 1000% tax is definitely on the wrong side of the laffer curve. They are essentially banning the internet.
The laffer curve is the law of diminishing returns applied to taxation revenues. It is relevant anywhere the government cares about tax revenues rather than being punitive or arbitrary, and its effects depend on the item being taxed and the effect this has on the wider economy.
The stupidity of European politicians is that extreme, it cannot be explained away by assuming a lack of education. I was never a conspiracy theorist, but the discrepancy between "That's something an educated person should understand" and what they are actually doing is that large I cannot bridge it mentally.
This may be a defect of mine, it probably is, but I have no but.
If you’re an American, the only news you hear from Europe is clickbait peddled by American journalists. Day-to-day politics in European countries doesn’t affect Americans, so it isn’t reported on. Journalists in Europe pay excess attention to American school shootings and Texas’ decades-long struggle to successfully administer the death penalty for the same reasons.
>And foreigners not in the know are about to get whalloped for $1000 extra around the ring road.
Which is probably the point (same with the hotel tax), if I had to guess? I mean Iceland gets a lot of tourists, and they have no obligation to provide free roads to everyone. In fact, they have a beautiful country, so if they can, they should capitalize on it. How is this a proof that "The stupidity of European politicians is that extreme, it cannot be explained away by assuming a lack of education" (the original claim)? They're doing their job.
> why would VLC or any online company stay in France?
IIRC all the people involved with VLC are French and live in France. They might want to stay in their native country where they speak the language, have families, have the right to remain and vote etc etc.
I don’t work for VLC but do live and work in France. I think you’re right on the reasons (and there are likely others) but of all the ones you mention, I think it is the family that is the biggest reason I stay. I could speak English and French elsewhere in Europe, have the right to live anywhere in the EU thanks for the Union’s freedom of movement, and I can ‘sort of’ vote, if only for local and European elections.
But with kids in school, relatives close by, and family links in the city and region whre we live, moving somewhere else is not yet on the cards no matter how large the tax bill and unsettled the politics - at least for the moment.
Couldn't they just admit the problem with capitalism is that you run out of other people's money, and then stop giving all the tax money to billionaires, and then there'd be enough money left for everyone else?
The french government is who decided the french government has to pay all that money, they can just decide differently.
The proble. Is they dont do that. It is mostly going to retired pensioners. Now you have a conflict between the voting elderly masses and the workers paying taxes.
The billionaires are irrelevant. You could take every penny they have and it wouldn't make a difference
If you're suggesting what I think you're suggesting (just stealing the public debt) the problem with that is
1) paying money to billionnaires cost 67B euros, let's say 10% more this year, to 73B (interest on debt so France can keep lending 170B more every year)
2) not paying money to billionnaires costs 170B euros (france needs 170B euros in new debt every year to balance the books)
Oh and of course when it does become worth doing, stealing the public debt, there is still the little matter of needing to get French people to do 250B worth of extra labor without paying them 1 cent extra (if they kick the can down the road, which they will, it should settle on about that amount per year). Essentially French people will have to work 1/6th harder one way or the other. But by paying billionnaires they can wait with that another 4 years.
Or, you know, they could work 1/30th extra now. 11 days per year. But that means not kicking the can down the road.
Similar figures for all EU countries (except Germany, for the moment at least), but they get to watch France solve it first because they're not the worst offender.
Quite terrifying that this appears to be a sincere comment. The top marginal tax rate on French nationals including CEHR is over 55%. The country spends ~60% of its GDP, almost 10% higher than the European average, let alone the average worldwide.
Could you elaborate how France is "giving all the money to billionaires"?
That's quite easy: billionaires are not contributing fairly and constantly evade taxation, thus concentrating more and more of the national added value.
That presumes billionaires have no agency and aren't at all responsible for the world we live in. It assumes they don't spend millions on political ads and lobbyists and politicians. That they aren't responsible for the actions their companies take. That private equity does the things they do and the billionaires funding them don't have any say in what they do. It assumes billionaires' companies aren't also responsible for how the world is going, and that they don't meeting with other billionaires and make plans together.
So once you've milked the 43 French billionaires to extend French spending by 2.5 years or so (this assumes you extract 100% of their wealth into actual liquidity), what's your plan for year 3?
Quite terrifying that this appears to be a sincere comment. Do you really believe billionaires pay even near the top marginal rate? It’s well established that once you reach the very very top of fortunes, the effective tax rate starts going down.
As the Europeans were forced to cut off cheap energy supply from Russia, it has really hurt some of their economies and it has partly contributed to the economic crisis emerging in EU. It is one of the major reasons why EU members are so opposed to ending the Ukraine war, despite their ally US pointing out that that horse (i.e. the proxy war) has been whipped for all its political worth and prolonging it anymore will likely backfire on the west (a defeat of Ukraine strengthens Russia, a defeat of Russia may result in nuclear war or further break up of it resulting in unrest and possibly civil war in that region that China would exploit and benefit hugely from as it moves to capture Russian territories, to protect its own interest, while any new breakaway nation states that form may also possess nuclear weapons from the vast Russian nuclear arsenal presenting other long term headaches). A "mini wartime" economy due to the Ukraine war is the only thing, some EU members feel, is sustaining their economy, away from the breakpoint. And specifically, with respect to France, one of the major issue it has is that it never really gave up its imperialistic stake in its African colonies, which has been increasingly challenged by competition from China and Russia. As Africans increasingly assert their sovereignty, France is slowly being edged out in Africa. Even the Americans are now encroaching in Africa, on French influence, to retain western influence there and protect West's access to African natural resources.
- what Europeans tend to be opposed to is allowing conquest to stand, no?
Maybe. I am sceptical as I don't see that in their political actions. What realistic and practical solution do they actually offer towards that end, except for saying war will not end until they accept our demand (a stand quite similar to Russia)? (That strategy would be appropriate if, with their support, Ukraine could actually reclaim its lost territories - i.e. a military solution was viable. But it is clear that without NATO troops in the battlefield, this is highly unlikely.).
As for the claim of "mini wartime" economy, everyone was worried about the state of EU's economy when the war started and as it progressed, demands for declaring a wartime economy became very public. Some examples:
I mean, the law is stupid, but as one of the commenters there says, there is a 2% revenue (profit?) cap, and I don't think that VideoLAN makes a lot of revenue.
That does present the situation grimly. Do you pay the Danegeld to get the former to not do the assault thing? After all, the malicious competent can perhaps be bought. On the other hand, the incompetent could be manipulated by a sufficiently capable intelligence. I'm not one of those, but then again I'm not one of those who can buy the malicious competent either, to say nothing of the unfortunate situation where one ends up with the malicious incompetent - having mistaken malice for unaligned self-interested competence.
Drop the labels, preferred victim groups and excuses for your preferred ideology, heap everything together and you're getting closer to the truth:
My big fear about politicians is corruption, authoritarian tendencies and stupidity
There, done, put a pin in it. There's corrupt politicos on all sides of the spectrum, there's authoritarians on all sides and stupidity seems to be endemic.
It's extremely common that when a right wing government transitions to a left wing government, the left wing government notices it has insane unpayable debt and tries a bunch of desperate things to repay it.
Mamdani had the same problem but was luckily able to negotiate practicable payment plans on NYC's debt.
Also I believe it's much easier to solve well intentioned stupidity than to solve malice.
You do realise the same is true for moves from the left to the right? The left spends until the coffers are empty, gets voted out by those fed up with the miserable state of the economy, the right takes over and brings things back on track through austerity measures, the economy wakes up but austerity is still demanded due to the size of the mess left by the lefties. Those same lefties point at the blooming economy and complain that only the rich get to profit while we live in austerity, vote for us and everyone gets a free beer and pony. People vote the left in, they start spending like crazy until the cycle repeats. Been there, seen it happen several times.
No, it is not euro-centric. The previous US regime also spent like drunks, did you forget about all the stimulus packages which pushed inflation up to almost 10%?
> It's extremely common that when a right wing government transitions to a left wing government, the left wing government notices it has insane unpayable debt and tries a bunch of desperate things to repay it.
They both often continue increasing deficits and spending until they can't.
> Mamdani had the same problem but was luckily able to negotiate practicable payment plans on NYC's debt.
The last right-wing mayor was Bloomberg (I don't know how right-wing Bloomberg really is when he tried running as a Democrat), and that was 13 years ago.
> Also I believe it's much easier to solve well intentioned stupidity than to solve malice.
Well-intentioned stupidity can go on for far longer because people won't want to intervene because of a negative perception when intervening. If there is malice, there isn't a negative perception when intervening.
> It's extremely common that when a right wing government transitions to a left wing government, the left wing government notices it has insane unpayable debt and tries a bunch of desperate things to repay it.
Meanwhile the right wing opposition keeps pointing fingers and telling that it's the left's (or center's, whatever) fault. Happened multiple times.
Please stop pressing that down-vote button on anything outside the desired narrative. What nbajka says is true, corruption is universal. It is also true worldwide, not just in Europe. Corruption knows no ideological boundaries. Power corrupts, politics is about power, those in power sometimes abuse it. Yes, right-wing politicians are sometimes as corrupt as left-wing politicians. Yes, left-wing politicians are sometimes as corrupt as right-wing politicians. There's corrupt centrists as well.
Companies that put profit first and have no ethical boundaries usually grow faster because our economy is built to reward them. Becoming a successful politician takes a lot of money. Selfish and unethical people are more likely to be right wing.
When you put that together it's obvious. Being a bad person leads to getting rich and having strong conservative views, and if you have both you become a right wing politician easily.
Why do left-wing politicians always get given an out when they do malicious stuff, but the right doesn't? I think all politicians are lying and corrupt scumbags.
I find it astounding that people can apply different rules to one group of politicians because they say things they like. I hold them all to the same standard; I assume they are all lying and corrupt until proven otherwise.
Paying 0.055 EUR per GB of traffic sent to French residents makes video streaming fundamentally unprofitable.
Not just video streaming. Think of game downloads, software updates, video calls, cloud storage, backups.
A GTA 6 download is estimated to be 210 GB. Under this law the publisher or storefront will have to pay an extra 11.5 EUR per copy in tax. And not just for a sale, but for every download.
Got the latest Apple security update? Think about whether it is really worth paying a couple bucks to install it.
> A GTA 6 download is estimated to be 210 GB. Under this law the publisher or storefront will have to pay an extra 11.5 EUR per copy in tax.
Maybe this would teach the publisher some "computer science". /s
Sure, but the problem is that this is outweighed by the downsides to the law.
Government getting a strongly-worded letter from Netflix is a hilarious concept.
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>> Paying 0.055 EUR per GB of traffic sent to French residents makes video streaming fundamentally unprofitable.
How so? If you're paying a few EUR to watch a movie there's should be plenty of profit left.
Video streaming platforms are not generally running on a pay-per-view monetization model. A few offer this, but the vast majority of them are offering it at $15-20/months for unlimited streaming. 4K video uses quite a bit of bandwidth. Low end is something like 15Mbps. That’s ~7GB/hour. Or, $0.385/hour at these proposed rates. Doesn’t take long to start approaching the cost of the streaming services charge.
And for households with kids, it's easy to imagine that turning into 30 hours a month, or $12 by your reasonable estimate. That's not a huge number, but I'm sure that'd push almost any streaming service into negative territory. I don't know what the average service's profit margins are, but highly doubt any of them could absorb that kind of hit.
The easy answer there is to limit French residents to 720p rather than 4K for the $15 plan.
720p AV1 is about 700mb/hr, so about an order of magnitude less than your 7GB/hour.
It's not like a 720p limit for tax reasons is any worse than a 720p limit for lack-of-Widevine-support reasons.
What if you're paying a few EUR a month for unlimited streaming on some app, not high profit new movies? The profit they make per episode for some rerurn of some old show you binge is probably a few cents at best.
That's not how streaming services work
This is the most hilarious thing I have ever read. Part of me wants this law to go into effect just to watch an entire country send itself back to 1988 to try and compy with it.
Summary of n°I-1358:
- It's a tax on internet "content", but they haven't defined what that means exactly, so by default it would apply to all internet traffic.
- Bytes delivered to French users by ISPs are taxed (but not user uploads).
- ISPs are responsible for tracking exactly where every GB originates from and will have to report the names to the government.
- The "content provider" then has to pay 0.055 EUR per GB that they sent.
- No explanation for how user-to-user traffic is handled. No explanation for what ISP -> user means (e.g. does P2P count)? No details on how ISPs will track the upstream source. About a million other similar questions are unanswered.
- The amendment was adopted today, and the assembly will vote on it as part of their full budget (but there are still many stages left before it can become law). Even by government standards this is way too idiotic to actually come into effect.
Why not implement it via the ISP? the isp just bills the customer 0.055eur per GB downstream, and remits the tax collected to the govt?
yes, somewhat sarcastic - but the point being, they DID seem to understand the stupidity, and thus the long-way around approach: ISP -> classifies the origin and reports to govt -> then presumably govt sends a tax notice to the origin?
They desperately would like to but each time they tried, the population anger forced them to back off any proposal.
If you do it at the ISP level, it is very obvious that it is the consumer that will pay because the monthly bill will increase of the same amount.
This is why you have the current proposal, because in their twisted mind, the rich digital giants will foot the bill of any tax without the customer paying anything.
The parliamentary responsible for that even said "the customer will not pay anything because Facebook is free".
To be noted that there are also to additional factor pushing for that on the political side:
- Here we have "unlimited" plan on almost anything, and ISP have to compete so no one can go back to "per-giga" plan to be able to extract more income. So ISP are lobbying hard for such laws that could allow them to have a good excuse to stop unlimited plans all at the same time.
- The political group that are pushing that are quite retarded, and they have an ecological agenda that is totally unscientific. And so they are really like thinking that they act for the environment because when you watch a youtube video dolphins are dying and if you have thousands of emails in your mailbox, you pollute as much as doing a round trip flight between Paris and NewYork. So consuming "data" is bad because it is like consuming physical products...
France, like every EU country, is desperate to tax internet companies, because they can't currently. But, internet is largely ad-sponsored and even tiny taxes would destroy the business model.
The way this tax looks it just means you have to exclude French people from the internet. This won't work.
They can, and they do. Through VAT. Netflix is a consumer service. They can simply create a different VAT category and be done with it.
I mean they're desperate to tax:
1) fully not-in-France remote businesses like SAAS companies
2) ad-supported business (e.g. tax Google, but not the ads they sell in France, but all the impressions they get (and pay out to someone else or to themselves) due to French people)
You see what I mean. Tax both sides, like they already do for French companies in France.
> internet is largely ad-sponsored
They should tax ads then. Since that's the source of money that fuels everything they should tax at the source.
Make the companies report how many ads they run, how much they get paid on that and tax that.
You won't catch them all initially but you'll catch some and then you can gradually tighten the system.
And this will go far enough from the consumer that he might actually not notice. Ad budgets of companies are very flexible and if you hit all of them, they'll all just reduce their ad spending at no harm to anyone.
> They should tax ads then
That's what they're trying to do. The problem is that the person paying for the ads is not in France (and has no presence in the EU at all), and the person in France isn't paying for the service (like Google search, or ChatGPT), so there "is nothing to tax".
And then there's the Irish problem ...
Wait, why is VideoLan hit by this? Do they stream content themselves?
https://pastebin.com/zHkErGHP google translated version of article explains that the tax is not on any specific type of data but on any data delivered to french citizens/corps.
I don't have VideoLan's internal metrics, but if they're saying it'll cost them millions they're saying they deliver over ~18tb (or ~36tb for a tax of 2million) to french peeps per year
The tax seems to be general, not limited to video/audio. Like downloads of the VLC client.
Because it's the actual generator of the bits that is supposed to pay. Which means you let a French person download anything at all, you're supposed to pay. If someone downloads your software from a mirror, the mirror can "identify you", and you'll be charged. No matter where you are.
This is supposed to let the French tax authorities collect 20B in additional tax revenue.
And yes, I don't see how Youtube (or Facebook, or Tiktok, or Netflix, or even something like Steam ...) can operate with such a tax in France.
>If someone downloads your software from a mirror
Who pays the tax in 'anonymous' p2p schemes?
If I upload to a french server from a ukranian server that I seed through a swiss based VPN using a norwegian seedbox that I paid a friend for in cash, how does the french government bill me? Do they subpoena the ukranian server to see where the data come from? Does the swiss government, not seeing any legal issue with my data, comply and hand over my norwegian server? Does the norwegian seedbox provider or my friend at the company foot the bill because they've no record of me?
What about networking stacks in which the requester can't necessarily identify where the data genuinely originated? Suppose I torrent a genuine Linux ISO in france. Do all of the peers get fractional bills? Or is it on the distro maintainer? What if the data didn't really originate from any of the peers but was fetched for me by the peers and the peers don't tell me (or therefore the ISPs) where they got the data from?
What if I put, say, VLC in an encrpyted zip. The ISP and therefore the french gov would see this as data coming from me since it doesn't hash as VLC, but they also can't prove that it came from me if I demonstrate that it was actually downloaded from a forum.
What about anonymous data? If 4chan is mirroring images for me that I uploaded from a McDonalds and a french frog downloads it, how do I get a bill? Does 4chan eat the bill or forward it to the McDonalds? Does the McDonalds eat the bill or hire a tech to cross-reference cameras and IP logs? What if I paid for the food in cash? Do they check some mythical "who owns this laptop" database provided by google/meta/microsoft? What if my laptop isn't in those databases? The local McDonalds is forced to foot the bill as they can't provide a patsie?
If I send a friend a video on via facebook messenger, who foots the bill? Facebook didn't send the data, I did. Is facebook going to rewrite it's eula to allow them to bill me for "woops your friend was in france at the time"?
This may all seem like hand-waving what-aboutism, but there are legitimate questions at hand. If public data is expensive and there are routes that do not result in billing, why would anyone choose the expensive route for any reason other than ignorance of the free route? If those who know would choose the free route, how is france going to collect all, most, or any of their booty?
Most of what you say is called tax evasion. The rest of your questions are far too complicated legally to answer, but many governments cooperate to prevent it. I might also mention it's criminal (meaning you get locked up if you get caught, you don't just have to pay). So I'd say you run a pretty big risk.
But in general, I must say that's something I really wonder about. Because what Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) did was also very large scale violation of copyright law, with technically even also includes tax evasion (they didn't pay authors, and had they paid them, they would have had to registers VAT on that amount). And they did it before that became legal, so they took a risk that could have resulted in very very large criminal sentences. And now we're of course seeing that the justice system isn't fair and won't destroy billionnaires just because they commit large scale violation of the law. But I do wonder: how do you decide to do this. Copyright violations have gotten sentences of up to 2 months plus 50,000 in damages PER INFRACTION. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Bill Gates all had their companies commit literally hundreds of millions of infractions against these laws to get their models started, knowing full well it was illegal ... AFTERWARDS congress has declared it's kind-of allowed (yes, really via a specific organization so that congress can claim they didn't do anything, but it was congress power being used to do it) ... but ... 50000 times hundreds of millions ... if congress had acted differently the punishments would have destroyed any billionnaire's fortune. How do you take such a risk? I don't understand.
Clearly: billionnaires get protected and small authors (frankly even quite big ones) got universally fucked. That's the net effect and 100% intentional. What I can't understand is WHY. If this had been put up to a democratic vote, it seems to me guaranteed billionnaires would have been convicted.
Btw: BOTH US AND EU have declared it legal, which I also wonder how that happens. But please don't start with "that's how the US works", or "of course Trump". I mean I see that too, but every important country leader could have stopped that change, including pretty far leftist figures like Pedro Sanchez could have stopped the EU from accepting this. They didn't.
This is an exceedingly dumb tax. A more reasonable tax would be one for storing user data. That would make PII a liability, not something you hold on to forever in hopes of selling to some scammy third party when you fold.
They will tax everyone for everything before they even contemplate controlling their spending.
they are in an older electorate death spiral.
What can be cut and by how much?
Social spending, by a lot, even though only a 5% cut would set the budgets right.
I bet they can also cut a lot of politicians and designated positions, but I'm not that deluded to think they would.
Social spending is redistributive, it reduces wealth inequalities. Shrink it and you make the actual issue worse. I guarantee you this 5% we recover wouldn't be used to balance the budget, but to grant another tax cut to the wealthy. And let's not even mention the consequences of cutting 1/20th of total social spending on human lives, this spending is not just a frivolous expense we can cut in when needed. We've been doing neoliberalism for 50 years, maybe it's time we cut our losses and find something better?
Here's a link to the amendment: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
I don't have an X account, so I can't see the conversation, but there don't appear to be any carveouts for non-profits or small businesses in the amendment, unless perhaps "any company offering an internet access service to households and businesses" has more criteria in context than a simple reading would suggest.
I wonder how distribution via torrent would be accounted for. Or if it would be worth it for larger players to adopt such a model, or just pay up or exit France.
Your version is marked as rejected three weeks ago. The screenshot is of a version that was adopted today.
https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
This is the current one.
I haven't done french since high school. So totally chatgpt and google translate reading this to me, but I really don't get what VideoLAN has to do with this.
The law is crazy with a €55/TB tax on ingress to France (including local cdns). But it's got nothing to do with your video player.
> A tax is established based on the flows of digital data emitted by content providers and paid by the latter
> When a data emitter uses a content delivery network to cache content near end users, the amount of data emitted is considered equal to the sum of the outgoing flows from the delivery network
Imagine paying €8 to download Balder's gate 3 lol.
https://xnologin.com/videolan/status/2116229135919919278
https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
the text menstions several times that internet providers are the one in charge of collecting and paying the tax, i don't see how the softwares enabling the streaming/download would be under threat?
I think the key terms to note here are: "content and applications providers" (translation's mine). The law seems to only apply to those companies producing both, which should leave VideoLan out of the picture. French can be a bit ambiguous sometimes (as English maybe), here there are 2 possible readings in French:
- content providers and application providers
- providers of both content and applications
I don't think that the first interpretation has a leg though, because of the remaining of the text.
This was expected. France is in a lot of debt trouble and it’s highly alarming development for Eurozone. Unlike the US, France cannot print more Euros to stay afloat and the ECB, who can, is institutionally hand-cuffed to not do so. Its chief just quit in a seemingly related situation but optically unrelated way.
Just to clarify: Christine Lagarde hasn't quit as in quit today, rather, she announced she will resign in February, 9 months before the end of her term.
That Laffer curve is going to hit France in the gonads.
Laffer curve is about percentages (and also irrelevant below 80-90% and irrelevant if you think government shouldn't be a business). Taxing people with zero money millions of dollars isn't even on the curve, it's just a completely separate bad thing.
The separate internet tax on the other hand, that's about 1000% of the cost of internet, and a 1000% tax is definitely on the wrong side of the laffer curve. They are essentially banning the internet.
The laffer curve is the law of diminishing returns applied to taxation revenues. It is relevant anywhere the government cares about tax revenues rather than being punitive or arbitrary, and its effects depend on the item being taxed and the effect this has on the wider economy.
Discussion:
French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50308240
The stupidity of European politicians is that extreme, it cannot be explained away by assuming a lack of education. I was never a conspiracy theorist, but the discrepancy between "That's something an educated person should understand" and what they are actually doing is that large I cannot bridge it mentally.
This may be a defect of mine, it probably is, but I have no but.
If you’re an American, the only news you hear from Europe is clickbait peddled by American journalists. Day-to-day politics in European countries doesn’t affect Americans, so it isn’t reported on. Journalists in Europe pay excess attention to American school shootings and Texas’ decades-long struggle to successfully administer the death penalty for the same reasons.
What does your comment have to do with out of touch European politicians?
I disagree.
I've been watching Iceland news, along with machine translation of Icelandic.
Right now, they're increasing taxes on parking, toll roads, 30% increase on hotels and B&B's, and per-kilometer driving tax.
It's insane the amount of taxes on taxes on taxes. And foreigners not in the know are about to get whalloped for $1000 extra around the ring road.
Sure, Iceland isn't EU proper. But they are Schengen along with other alliances. EU complaint stands, given they tax tax tax tax.
As an European (not from iceland):
>Right now, they're increasing taxes on parking,
Great! Less car-centric infrastructure.
>toll roads
Great! Less cars.
>and per-kilometer driving tax
Great! Less cars on the road.
>And foreigners not in the know are about to get whalloped for $1000 extra around the ring road.
Which is probably the point (same with the hotel tax), if I had to guess? I mean Iceland gets a lot of tourists, and they have no obligation to provide free roads to everyone. In fact, they have a beautiful country, so if they can, they should capitalize on it. How is this a proof that "The stupidity of European politicians is that extreme, it cannot be explained away by assuming a lack of education" (the original claim)? They're doing their job.
The combination of ignorant politicians and smart lobbyists is universal.
Edit: why would VLC or any online company stay in France?
> why would VLC or any online company stay in France?
IIRC all the people involved with VLC are French and live in France. They might want to stay in their native country where they speak the language, have families, have the right to remain and vote etc etc.
I don’t work for VLC but do live and work in France. I think you’re right on the reasons (and there are likely others) but of all the ones you mention, I think it is the family that is the biggest reason I stay. I could speak English and French elsewhere in Europe, have the right to live anywhere in the EU thanks for the Union’s freedom of movement, and I can ‘sort of’ vote, if only for local and European elections.
But with kids in school, relatives close by, and family links in the city and region whre we live, moving somewhere else is not yet on the cards no matter how large the tax bill and unsettled the politics - at least for the moment.
France is desperate.
They have a deficit problem, they cannot print money and people really don't want to give up their pensions.
Unless the curb public spending they are heading to a hard crash (and will probably take a couple other economies for the ride).
Couldn't they just admit the problem with capitalism is that you run out of other people's money, and then stop giving all the tax money to billionaires, and then there'd be enough money left for everyone else?
The french government is who decided the french government has to pay all that money, they can just decide differently.
The proble. Is they dont do that. It is mostly going to retired pensioners. Now you have a conflict between the voting elderly masses and the workers paying taxes.
The billionaires are irrelevant. You could take every penny they have and it wouldn't make a difference
Just lower the rent then.
If you're suggesting what I think you're suggesting (just stealing the public debt) the problem with that is
1) paying money to billionnaires cost 67B euros, let's say 10% more this year, to 73B (interest on debt so France can keep lending 170B more every year)
2) not paying money to billionnaires costs 170B euros (france needs 170B euros in new debt every year to balance the books)
Oh and of course when it does become worth doing, stealing the public debt, there is still the little matter of needing to get French people to do 250B worth of extra labor without paying them 1 cent extra (if they kick the can down the road, which they will, it should settle on about that amount per year). Essentially French people will have to work 1/6th harder one way or the other. But by paying billionnaires they can wait with that another 4 years.
Or, you know, they could work 1/30th extra now. 11 days per year. But that means not kicking the can down the road.
Similar figures for all EU countries (except Germany, for the moment at least), but they get to watch France solve it first because they're not the worst offender.
> Couldn't they just admit the problem with capitalism is that you run out of other people's money
What do you mean when you say "capitalism"?
Anything he doesn't like is capitalism. And we're all Redditors now, don't you know?
Quite terrifying that this appears to be a sincere comment. The top marginal tax rate on French nationals including CEHR is over 55%. The country spends ~60% of its GDP, almost 10% higher than the European average, let alone the average worldwide.
Could you elaborate how France is "giving all the money to billionaires"?
That's quite easy: billionaires are not contributing fairly and constantly evade taxation, thus concentrating more and more of the national added value.
You could kill them all and take every penny they own and it still wouldn't solve the problem.
That presumes billionaires have no agency and aren't at all responsible for the world we live in. It assumes they don't spend millions on political ads and lobbyists and politicians. That they aren't responsible for the actions their companies take. That private equity does the things they do and the billionaires funding them don't have any say in what they do. It assumes billionaires' companies aren't also responsible for how the world is going, and that they don't meeting with other billionaires and make plans together.
None of that matters for the French national spending and budget issue.
They arent the ones driving up pensions for the retired, or instituting the anti-growth policies.
Like I said, kill every single one and the problem would still be there.
So once you've milked the 43 French billionaires to extend French spending by 2.5 years or so (this assumes you extract 100% of their wealth into actual liquidity), what's your plan for year 3?
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Quite terrifying that this appears to be a sincere comment. Do you really believe billionaires pay even near the top marginal rate? It’s well established that once you reach the very very top of fortunes, the effective tax rate starts going down.
https://www.ipp.eu/publication/note-ipp-n92-quels-impots-les...
I don't understand. Can't they just borrow $40 trillion?
As the Europeans were forced to cut off cheap energy supply from Russia, it has really hurt some of their economies and it has partly contributed to the economic crisis emerging in EU. It is one of the major reasons why EU members are so opposed to ending the Ukraine war, despite their ally US pointing out that that horse (i.e. the proxy war) has been whipped for all its political worth and prolonging it anymore will likely backfire on the west (a defeat of Ukraine strengthens Russia, a defeat of Russia may result in nuclear war or further break up of it resulting in unrest and possibly civil war in that region that China would exploit and benefit hugely from as it moves to capture Russian territories, to protect its own interest, while any new breakaway nation states that form may also possess nuclear weapons from the vast Russian nuclear arsenal presenting other long term headaches). A "mini wartime" economy due to the Ukraine war is the only thing, some EU members feel, is sustaining their economy, away from the breakpoint. And specifically, with respect to France, one of the major issue it has is that it never really gave up its imperialistic stake in its African colonies, which has been increasingly challenged by competition from China and Russia. As Africans increasingly assert their sovereignty, France is slowly being edged out in Africa. Even the Americans are now encroaching in Africa, on French influence, to retain western influence there and protect West's access to African natural resources.
I don't think anyone is opposed to ending Russia's war of conquest in Ukraine, what Europeans tend to be opposed to is allowing conquest to stand, no?
Which EU members feel that regarding a ""mini wartime" economy"? Where can I see that evidenced?
- what Europeans tend to be opposed to is allowing conquest to stand, no?
Maybe. I am sceptical as I don't see that in their political actions. What realistic and practical solution do they actually offer towards that end, except for saying war will not end until they accept our demand (a stand quite similar to Russia)? (That strategy would be appropriate if, with their support, Ukraine could actually reclaim its lost territories - i.e. a military solution was viable. But it is clear that without NATO troops in the battlefield, this is highly unlikely.).
As for the claim of "mini wartime" economy, everyone was worried about the state of EU's economy when the war started and as it progressed, demands for declaring a wartime economy became very public. Some examples:
2022: Ukraine economic shock - https://www.eib.org/en/stories/ukraine-trade-inflation
2022: OECD report on impact of Russian war - https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/russia-s-war-of-aggression-aga...
2023: Does Europe need to declare a 'wartime economy'? - https://www.dw.com/en/does-europe-need-to-declare-a-wartime-...
2025: 'War economy:' Is the European 'peace project' at risk? - https://www.dw.com/en/what-is-a-war-economy/a-71996625
2025: Europe Rearms: What Defense Spending Means for Markets - https://rpc.cfainstitute.org/blogs/enterprising-investor/202...
2026: Europe's war economy - https://etedge-insights.com/featured-insights/geopolitics-an...
2026: The Irish Government is helping to usher in a new wartime economy in Europe - https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/08/29/irish-minister...
Who has switched to a war time economy? Who wants such an economy for economic reasons and not security reasons?
This law is crazy. The "French socialists" are really disconnected to any reality, they don't even exists as a political force currently.
To be fair, it's limited to what a "business" make as money. So it should exclude associations (which are not allowed to make money in France).
But yes, it's really a stupid law.
I mean, the law is stupid, but as one of the commenters there says, there is a 2% revenue (profit?) cap, and I don't think that VideoLAN makes a lot of revenue.
They don't, association in France can't make revenue/profit. (Except some of them from Alsace/Loraine because of WWII..., not relevant here)
My big fear about right wing politicians is corruption and authoritarian right assaults on women and minorities.
My big fear about left wing politicians is well intentioned stupidity.
That does present the situation grimly. Do you pay the Danegeld to get the former to not do the assault thing? After all, the malicious competent can perhaps be bought. On the other hand, the incompetent could be manipulated by a sufficiently capable intelligence. I'm not one of those, but then again I'm not one of those who can buy the malicious competent either, to say nothing of the unfortunate situation where one ends up with the malicious incompetent - having mistaken malice for unaligned self-interested competence.
Drop the labels, preferred victim groups and excuses for your preferred ideology, heap everything together and you're getting closer to the truth:
My big fear about politicians is corruption, authoritarian tendencies and stupidity
There, done, put a pin in it. There's corrupt politicos on all sides of the spectrum, there's authoritarians on all sides and stupidity seems to be endemic.
It's extremely common that when a right wing government transitions to a left wing government, the left wing government notices it has insane unpayable debt and tries a bunch of desperate things to repay it.
Mamdani had the same problem but was luckily able to negotiate practicable payment plans on NYC's debt.
Also I believe it's much easier to solve well intentioned stupidity than to solve malice.
You do realise the same is true for moves from the left to the right? The left spends until the coffers are empty, gets voted out by those fed up with the miserable state of the economy, the right takes over and brings things back on track through austerity measures, the economy wakes up but austerity is still demanded due to the size of the mess left by the lefties. Those same lefties point at the blooming economy and complain that only the rich get to profit while we live in austerity, vote for us and everyone gets a free beer and pony. People vote the left in, they start spending like crazy until the cycle repeats. Been there, seen it happen several times.
I assume this is Euro centric? In the US it’s been the right that have spent like drunks.
No, it is not euro-centric. The previous US regime also spent like drunks, did you forget about all the stimulus packages which pushed inflation up to almost 10%?
The deficit consistently decreases when democrats are in power and increases when republicans are in power.
The logic is "left good, right bad". In other places that people here would scoff at it, it is the opposite way around "right good, left bad".
Unfortunately, political tribalism is rife online, and it is as bad here as anywhere else.
That was COVID. Look at the last 30 years. Deficits have gone up faster under Republicans. Trump 2.0 doesn’t have any excuses.
> It's extremely common that when a right wing government transitions to a left wing government, the left wing government notices it has insane unpayable debt and tries a bunch of desperate things to repay it.
They both often continue increasing deficits and spending until they can't.
> Mamdani had the same problem but was luckily able to negotiate practicable payment plans on NYC's debt.
The last right-wing mayor was Bloomberg (I don't know how right-wing Bloomberg really is when he tried running as a Democrat), and that was 13 years ago.
> Also I believe it's much easier to solve well intentioned stupidity than to solve malice.
Well-intentioned stupidity can go on for far longer because people won't want to intervene because of a negative perception when intervening. If there is malice, there isn't a negative perception when intervening.
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We'd be very sad because there wouldn't be legitimate idiots like you to entertain us <3
Oh look another numbered spam account. How much do you get paid to persist with this? I want some of that moolah too.
> It's extremely common that when a right wing government transitions to a left wing government, the left wing government notices it has insane unpayable debt and tries a bunch of desperate things to repay it.
Meanwhile the right wing opposition keeps pointing fingers and telling that it's the left's (or center's, whatever) fault. Happened multiple times.
They both blame each other for their own incompetence.
What part of "Paying 0.055 EUR per GB of traffic sent to French residents" is well-intentioned? It's nothing but a nonsensical shakedown.
Also, left-wing governments are generally as corrupted and freedom-infringing as right-wing governments, at least in Europe.
Please stop pressing that down-vote button on anything outside the desired narrative. What nbajka says is true, corruption is universal. It is also true worldwide, not just in Europe. Corruption knows no ideological boundaries. Power corrupts, politics is about power, those in power sometimes abuse it. Yes, right-wing politicians are sometimes as corrupt as left-wing politicians. Yes, left-wing politicians are sometimes as corrupt as right-wing politicians. There's corrupt centrists as well.
Ah yes the famously intelligent right wing politicians.
They tend to be somewhat more practical and knowledgeable when it comes to pragmatic business and getting stuff done.
The stuff they want to get done might suck though.
They are complete imbeciles on many other issues.
Companies that put profit first and have no ethical boundaries usually grow faster because our economy is built to reward them. Becoming a successful politician takes a lot of money. Selfish and unethical people are more likely to be right wing.
When you put that together it's obvious. Being a bad person leads to getting rich and having strong conservative views, and if you have both you become a right wing politician easily.
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Why do left-wing politicians always get given an out when they do malicious stuff, but the right doesn't? I think all politicians are lying and corrupt scumbags.
I find it astounding that people can apply different rules to one group of politicians because they say things they like. I hold them all to the same standard; I assume they are all lying and corrupt until proven otherwise.
Hard to describe the current French government as particularly left wing.
Nitter link: https://twiiit.com/videolan/status/2116229135919919278
How can I see an English translation?
Firefox has a translation tool in the browser.