This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
> Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Mind you we have a hungarian private torrent tracker with 400k users and 2.7 petabyte of data running since 2005. Virtually everyone is using it in the country but no one really wants to shut it down because at this point it's also a cultural archive.
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Yes, France is in the EU. However, the actions of France do not equate to the actions of the EU.
Despite what pro-Brexit type people will tell you, there is a lot of sovereignty in local laws within the EU. And the ability to set your own taxes is one of them.
This is quite stupid, but I really wish those who are quick to jump on a ridiculous piece of legislation as supposed proof of Europe's downfall would be as critical discussing consequences of underregulation.
Where exactly do you see under regulation? Everywhere i look i see massive over regulation. If you mean under enforcement of antitruat law so obviously stupid oligopolies are rampant instead of shattered into hundreds of pieces, i guess i could agree with that but thats not regulation, thats destruction of the bad end product of capitalism so that the amazing middle of capitalism can thrive.
I agree with part of your point, but it also depends on what you call a powerhouse. It has its advantages and disadvantages.
It's true that today Europe relies more on the outside for a lot of tech than the opposite, but it's changing and it's not the only measure of quality.
But I especially think your last point about old people is really both false and irrelevant. If I wanted to troll, I could say it's really dumb, just americans being americans.
Btw, the EU is a tech powerhouse, you just don't know that. ASML, Zeiss, TRUMPF, etc. have full monopoly on eUV lithography and majority of the market on any other nodes. Just one example.
Airbus leads with about 55%–60% of the active narrow and wide-body commercial aircraft market. Airbus has much better track record and doesn't collide with FAA
and doesn't "skimp" on development and QA (I'm looking at you MCAS!).
The culture is right there, we are taking our sweet time.
ASML isn't a great example since it's largely American technology invented by the US government department of energy. The EUV light source itself is researched, developed, and manufactured entirely in California.
ASML is an important company but it is mostly just an integrator of technology from many different countries.
Basically, US DoE invented the core tech and formed a consortium called EUV LLC to further develop the technology. ASML came along much later to acquire SVG in order to gain commercial access to the technology and research. The Dutch company "ASML" didn't actually invent most of it. They are just the integrator.
This is how ASML even describes itself:
> Board member Wayne Allan in 2023:
“We're an integrator – we build some of the modules in our machines, but we procure a huge amount of materials and critical components from suppliers, nearly 80% of the components.”
Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
First and foremost, I think you're underestimating the complexity of integrating the most complex technology invented as of date. Just remember High-NA EUV systems require up to 7 freight jets to deliver.
Second of all, EUV isn't everything. There is a lot of "legacy" node demand.
> Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
"Some" of the American. It's funny how you name it first despite it's being the minority.
> As of 2025, ASML is the only company that produces and sells EUV systems for chip production.
I was responding to your comment about the US Dept of Energy's role in the history of the technology. Also I quoted ASML executives describing themselves exactly as an integrator, not a developer of the technology. But you seem to be upset about this for some reason.
Yeah, but so are car manufacturers. A car is greater than the sum of its parts. I'd wager an EUV machine is probably a teensy bit more complicated than a car.
You could say the same about lots of software. You didn't write the programming language, same for libraries and so forth...
I wasn't trying to downplay ASML's important role in the commercialization of the machines. I was just responding to the comment "ASML is as Dutch as it gets" which is not remotely true.
EU/Europe lead in airspace (Airbus), industrial automation/electronics (Siemens, Schneider, ABB), 5G network infra (Erickson, Nokia), earth observation (Copernicus), wind energy technology, medical image technology, agricultural/greenhouse etc.
People here are in a bubble who think tech is only FAANG and node_modules with JavaScript frameworks.
Airbus and Boeing are neck and neck - but both rely on American jet turbines, either directly or through joint ventures.
The US has orders of magnitude more satellites thanks to SpaceX, including American direct-to-satellite networking.
Medical imaging is another example of where the US wins on scale alone. MRI machines are extremely common here, almost twice as many per capita as the OECD average.
Europe has lots of talent but a really horrible regulatory environment. That's why it's not a "powerhouse" and is instead almost always stuck in second place.
No, it really is in the sense that a lot of technology is developed here. Where things go awry is when someone tries to use that technology to create something and is met by a sheer wall of regulations, taxes, levies, restrictions and demands. This often results in those people jumping over the pond to continue their efforts in the USA. A good example is the development of the first practical electrically driven regional airliner which started off in Göteborg, Sweden: [1] In May 2024, Heart Aerospace announced the establishment of a new research and development hub in Los Angeles focusing on its hybrid-electric propulsion system, and the Forslunds moved there to oversee operations. The company subsequently closed its Swedish operations in 2025 and moved its headquarters to Los Angeles. In interviews with the Forslunds they quote better access to financing, ease of attracting those with the needed knowledge and experience to design and build these aeroplanes, easier access to the required materials and the general attitude towards startup companies. Mind, they're in California, the place where many American companies are fleeing away from due to over-regulation and excessive taxation. Coming from the EU it still seems to win and that is unfortunate.
I think we can do a lot better in this respect but to get there we'll need to scale down the regulatory mammoth which is the EU.
> they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Yes, but... isn't their assumption mostly correct? Spotify and Co have changed the equation in the sense that one doesn't have files anymore but when those laws came out they targeted MP3 players and DVDs who were, indeed, full of pirated media.
I don't like the result for other reasons, but the assumption seemed always relatively accurate.
That is not the reason for this tax, which is called a private copying levy[1], by the way.
The motivation is even more stupid than that, it is to compensate authors for "lost" income due to buyers making private copies of their media, which is thankfully legal. For example, if I accidentally scratch a CD and it doesn't play anymore, I won't buy a new one if I had made a backup.
Very interesting how eager people are to accept headlines at face value when they support biases, before reading the article or trying to understand what's actually happening.
5 and a half cent per Gb?! Thats pretty wild. I would pay at least 10 euros a month in tax. My friends in EU pay like 50 euros for shitty fiber, will they now need to pay 60? That pretty wild. I am all for light apps and low traffic and perma computing but wow.
Counterpoint: I am behind the gfw.. and seriously dont understand how anyone can get anything done… but it still seems to work… i pay like 2 euros for 500MBit fiber
Is everyone you know able to classify a business they run from their home connection as being a "content provider"? That's crazy, I know one person/entity who'd be considered as such.
Judging by the comments here, every single French person runs a CDN at home? What am I missing, or are people completely misunderstanding what this tax is targeting?
it isn‘t a tax in case of Germany but money which is paid to artists (Gema). Before streaming storing music in media was very common, it made sense to compensate for private sharing.
It has nothing to do with old people. You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know anything about.
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
There are people who consider this a good thing. I don’t have a strong opinion on it, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.
>but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.
Because its not a problem for Big-corp, but Opensource-Projects/Tor-Nodes, for example i would have to pay ~10$ a day just for my Tor-Relay. It's deeply Anti-Democratic and the opposite what the Internet should be.
It's not even clear yet if this would include self-hosted stuff like if you host a website for your FOSS project or a Tor relay. What news website you got that from, as the linked session notes doesn't clarify that at all.
The objective seems to be to target fournisseurs de contenu (content providers), and the mentioned collection mechanism identifies a entreprise émettrice (sending company). Also, they talk about "turnover" mattering as well, so if you don't charger people, another reason this might not affect you at all. If neither of those apply, like you hosting a website for a FOSS project, it's unlikely you'd have to pay this tax.
But, this is based on reading the session notes themselves, not news article. I'm happy to be corrected if I misunderstood anything.
If you are right, you can bet that YouTube-France will have Ad's every 2 seconds and Netflix gets really expensive, maybe the French Government really wants Piracy ;)
He means the part he's quoted with the ">" symbol.
It's not obvious that housing "tech powerhouses" is a good thing. I mean look at the US, and how much problems all these companies bring to society. I'm also not sure we'd want anything like that in Europe or EU, if we also need to accept the same consequences as the US did.
IMO Europe is facing most of the consequences and getting almost none of the benefits.
American billionaires are self-made (70% became billionaires during their life) where in Europe 70% inherited it. The powerhouse companies of the European economy are stagnant and the families which held them 100 years ago have a great chance of still holding them.
Are tech billionaires obnoxious? Yes, undoubtedly. I'd take them in a heartbeat over having a more permanent aristocracy.
It completely depends what you want from system and how efficient it will be. Want social protections dialed to 11 (like even small government bureaucrats getting golden parachutes worth 1-2 years of their salary while being otherwise practically un-fireable, regardless if they are actually needed... in fact most perm folks are extremely hard to let go). Or you want strong economic prosperity. Cannot have both, the best mix is Switzerland but French will die sooner to the last person before they would admit somebody did state and laws things better than them and that they should maybe get inspired a bit.
What french public conveniently fails to grasp and loses 100% of my support is the naive expectation that in struggling economy they should be rich, while having social system actually dialed to 12 since that 11 is never enough for them. And have 0 doubt, all the protesters now and also before are at the end after money. Money will magically appear in government budget and in all salaries, prices of petrol/diesel will be magically ultra low regardless of yet another failed war being waged by US causing massive rise in prices globally. If one doesn't travel around the world and just lives there it may feel like a normal default system, but given reality of the world out there its anything but.
Lets talk like adults what is achievable or not and manage expectations accordingly. Not very french way, is it. Any attempt to reform even a bit is met with extreme violence, blocking of economy and other self-harm behavior that ruins the economy further and solves 0 of underlying issues, so most cave in and problems fester. I predict it will get much worse in France before there is chance to get things better again, and how much depends on their ultra comfy, some would even say spoiled population.
Yeah, the tech powerhouse seems to refer to the US. There is no doubt that US dominates a lot of tech at the moments, China dominates a lot of manufacturing.
The US is a failing democracy ruled by ruthless liars and capitalists. China's surveillance and lack of freedom is beyond discussion. So EU not being a tech powerhouse still does not look too bad.
Wow it's almost like they're not taxing pirated music at all and are taxing gigabytes. I suppose France is more like a farm of users and they're not entitled to their natural resources because users are inherently slaves to globalized capitalism.
Imagine a US House of Representatives passes a law that allows higher taxes for obese people. And someone would say: “lol it’s fake news, it will never pass the senate”. Even if it doesn’t pass the Senate later, it’s huge news now that it passed the House in the first place.
That's not the right way to understand what happened. It's not as in the US with both parties in session and every vote count. It's very common in France for working sessions on technical texts to have very few deputies. Here only 35 where present, and only 21 bothered to vote. And now and then a minority party uses this for a PR coup, passing some text with no real majority while most are away. It has no consequence because it's turned down in the senate never to come back again. But there's always some politician to use such stunt for publicity. It's a nothing burger, but you need to understand how it works in France to get this I guess.
It seems likely this will never pass esp in this political environment, but maybe legislators should consider the international reputation costs of stupid decisions.
Their job is quite literally to sit in sessions and discuss potential laws, this is what us taxpayers give them money to do. It's not embarrassing to talk about whatever laws, regardless of how stupid because again, this is their job, they're evaluating things.
It'd be embarrassing if they'd actually make this as-is into law, which for obvious reasons wouldn't happen right now, but that hasn't happened yet.
Just like it's not embarrassing for a software developer to write code that has bugs, this happens even to the best of us. What would be embarrassing, would be to have that code deployed as-is to production, with bugs, that's the part we should be vigilant about.
Yes, repeating my comments from the other time this was disingenuously posted ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50310796 ) , this should be flagged if not removed. The way these posts are being titled is misinformation and rage bait.
It's also disappointing to see how many users here, people who you'd expect to at least have a mild familiarity with the internet and how it works, don't read the article, comments, or sometimes even the entire OP. They see a title that supports their biases, make wild assumptions, and immediately move to spitting vitriol into the comments.
That it made it even this far is ridiculous. I would chalk it up to the "boomer mentality" of out of touch politicians rather that a Europe vs America thing though.
What a horrible idea. This is like creating a special tax on start up capital. It goes against so many fundamentals, such as increasing efficiency, productivity, automation, carbon. It's just crazy.
This can be seen as a "look europe, we are trying to address our huge debt peoblem (which is 120% of gdp in 2026), please continue to help us". France as well as the French themselves do not want to address the extreme cost of their early pensions to their budget (25% of the 2026 budget!). The retirees and employees often get amazing perks from the government. Employees and retirees of EDF get a 90% discount on their gas and electric bill. 21% of the total workforce works for government... Meanwhile kids can't get a decent education, I would be pissed off too.
Ah, the game of what can be taxed that has the least lobbyists to protect it - it's a game that plays out as a decline for civilizations because government representatives aren't representing the interests of the people of the nation. And because the biggest entities with money have the most lobbyists.
Otherwise, this tax would cost me at least 50% of what I pay for all my food, daily.
50 GB of daily traffic is normal for me, sometimes even much more, e.g. one day ago I had a traffic of 1 TB per day, because I downloaded the Mistral Large LLM weights. So to download Mistral, I would have had to pay EUR 55, much more than I pay for a month of Internet access.
Here is the actual amendment [1] and also it is not yet law. It's not a tax on individuals using the internet. It's a tax on companies providing content to the customers of ISPs. There is a cap on the tax.
I also don't live in France and think it's dumb but I think we need better information than the topic line to have real discussion of it.
It passed 11 to 10 and has to still pass in the French senate's version of their finance bill and the French government is against it. [2]
It's not a tax on the customer directly, but who does it get passed on to? That's like saying VAT isn't a tax on the customer as the retailer pays it to the state.
Why would this even affect you, even if you lived in France? Did you just assume this was about residential download traffic somehow?
What on earth is going on in this comment section? Seems like it's 99% of Americans who obviously didn't read the session notes themselves, or even any background information in English, before commenting on this with their least charitable reading. I don't get it, why?
If you don't understand the thing, probably because you haven't spent even 2 minutes looking up information about it, why comment about some scenario you don't even know if it applies or not? Like what's the point, just to spread FUD for the fun of it?
YouTube is crushing our national TV product, so let's tax YouTube.
It seems... fine.
But legislators are slow and companies are smart, so likely what would happen is something like:
1. Tax goes in place.
2. YouTube decreases the quality and starts broadcasting in 640x480 VGA.
3. France gets pissed. Forces them to 'distribute content at world standards with a law'
4. YouTube challenges the law in court.
5. The case costs the French more than the revenue provided in the meanwhile.
1) How it changes behaviour (taxing something usually means less of that thing is produced, and sometimes you want less of something e.g. smoking as a classic example)
2) How much revenue it raises for the treasury after taking into account 1
I cannot help but think that on both counts this is really bad.
This seems like an absurdly high rate of taxation on a resource that if anything we want to increase the volume of. Creating disincentives for high speed/bandwidth connections and services surely means less economic activity net, which means lower revenues and profits to tax across multiple industries. You are creating very direct disincentives on economic activity in a very blunt way. Its not like you are say taxing online gambling activity which is a net social drain on society, this is everything digital/tech.
I can understand that they want to maybe tax mainly foreign tech and media firms, but this seems like the worst way to go about it with a tax that would make up the bulk of the cost to serve.
French government should buy a bunch of subscriptions like netflix or cheap games on Steam that have large download sizes and just download all day. Pay the monthly $20, then recover 10x that from taxing the CDN.
You can solve your government's finances with this one weird trick!
The link seems to be the minutes of a parliamentary debate about a multitude of topics. It does not explain what this tax is about and I guess there is another approval step in the senate (French is neither my mother tongue nor am I fowolling French politics)
That the current internet with social media and AI boom destroys democracies and the planet is a fact. Whether such tax is a good step to slow that down, I have not thought about.
Note that it will be for professional content provider, and they especially aim at the 20 biggest platforms, providing free content to France and taking advantage of its national market (think gafam)
This tax should also be capped to a fraction of their benefits.
End users, tor relays, content providers outside fortune x00 are out of scope .
Let's say that traffic (anything: ssh, sftp, http) enters a VPS in OVH in France from a laptop in Italy (Italian ISP) and some bot in the USA (eg googlebot) or some real person download something from that VPS (US ISP). Who's paying what? There are sent and received bytes for all parties.
What is the reason? Seems like absolute taxing the wrong thing. It is not attached to any cost for the government, not revenue or income directly and I can't see a reason to put people off using data (like you might do with pollution taxes) so why? (I don't speak or read French).
more tax revenue from any source they can imagine. Instead of trying to cut out the welfare, and reign in spending, it's always easier to propose a tax that's small and widespread (so that each individual may not be incentivized to fight it).
tbh, I don't understand why people are talking trash about this, I don't myself know if this would helps France but this is not a tax of individuals, if is like a border tax on US big corp imported GBs.
As usual, from time to time, France look at these companies and shave them a little bit, this is not a surprise.
I know Netflix can raise prices for french people, but this could be also their goal to get other alternative a better chance to compete.
This will show companies not getting away with those GBs! Everyone should pay for extra, this will save republic for the next 100 years at least, increase it next year to 5€ at least
Pfff... A minority group uses a time where only few deputies are there to pass an amendment with no majority behind. This will go to the senate where it will be removed, and back to the parliament where the majority groups will be more careful.
There is no chance this is going through. It's just posturing really. Posting this just wastes people time. A more accurate title would be "11 deputies vote for ... at a time when 35 people are in session and 21 bothered to vote".
Yeah unless they don't, though. They're only going to pay if they actually do business in France. Otherwise there is no legal or practical mechanism for the French government to compel them to pay.
Bonjour! I'm from Kazakhstan. I just uploaded few kibibytes of HTTP requests into elysee.fr. How do I pay for it now? Do they accept VISA? I don't want to evade taxes!
I remember, in 2025 friends that were into business said something along the lines of France being socially and economically doomed. I didn't know this much wrong could happen all at once.
How long until one of these dipshit regulators are going to FAFO and find their connections to the backbone are severed because no one wants to play with them anymore?
The situation is the exact opposite of what leftists and europoors think: American billionaires basically fund the US and pay taxes regardless of residence. Whereas in Europe the so-called middle class (1200€/mo pre-tax in the relatively “wealthy” areas where I live) pay the bulk of the taxes, and the wealthy use all kinds of loopholes in order to avoid paying any.
The situation is resulting in this terrible feedback loop of higher taxation, increased regulation, decreased productivity, and increased poverty. And then people turn to socialist politics which just continues to exacerbate the situation.
> American billionaires basically fund the US and pay taxes regardless of residence
US billionaires pay taxes ? Sounds like the start of a a great joke, what's the punchline ?
Remind me, who are those groups of people moving to Florida, Texas or wherever else just so they can escape the California wealth tax which is only a one-time 5% ?
Oh yeah, that's right. The US billionaires who are apparently so diligently willing to pay their taxes.
They pay regardless of the country they live in. The standard in European countries is that you’re only considered a tax resident if you spend a certain amount of time in the country per year. It’s easy for a wealthy person to avoid paying taxes in Europe, but an American can never avoid it, regardless of residence.
And again, just because they move to a state with lower taxes doesn’t mean they don’t pay taxes. The highest earners in the US pay the vast majority of taxes. This is a fact you can easily look into yourself.
This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Just old people being old people.
> Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
I live in Hungary where this is common but it's more like a "you pay tax for storage which goes to the labels, in turn we don't prosecute piracy" https://www.artisjus.hu/english/copyright-in-hungary/
Mind you we have a hungarian private torrent tracker with 400k users and 2.7 petabyte of data running since 2005. Virtually everyone is using it in the country but no one really wants to shut it down because at this point it's also a cultural archive.
In Sweden it’s tax to compensate for legal copies only (think fair use equivalent)
Prosecuting “piracy” is sold in as a free trade deal requirement with the US
He is talking about nCore. very high quality rips there. good stuff!
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Yes, France is in the EU. However, the actions of France do not equate to the actions of the EU.
Despite what pro-Brexit type people will tell you, there is a lot of sovereignty in local laws within the EU. And the ability to set your own taxes is one of them.
This is quite stupid, but I really wish those who are quick to jump on a ridiculous piece of legislation as supposed proof of Europe's downfall would be as critical discussing consequences of underregulation.
Where exactly do you see under regulation? Everywhere i look i see massive over regulation. If you mean under enforcement of antitruat law so obviously stupid oligopolies are rampant instead of shattered into hundreds of pieces, i guess i could agree with that but thats not regulation, thats destruction of the bad end product of capitalism so that the amazing middle of capitalism can thrive.
I agree with part of your point, but it also depends on what you call a powerhouse. It has its advantages and disadvantages. It's true that today Europe relies more on the outside for a lot of tech than the opposite, but it's changing and it's not the only measure of quality.
But I especially think your last point about old people is really both false and irrelevant. If I wanted to troll, I could say it's really dumb, just americans being americans.
We'll see about that.
Btw, the EU is a tech powerhouse, you just don't know that. ASML, Zeiss, TRUMPF, etc. have full monopoly on eUV lithography and majority of the market on any other nodes. Just one example.
Airbus leads with about 55%–60% of the active narrow and wide-body commercial aircraft market. Airbus has much better track record and doesn't collide with FAA and doesn't "skimp" on development and QA (I'm looking at you MCAS!).
The culture is right there, we are taking our sweet time.
ASML isn't a great example since it's largely American technology invented by the US government department of energy. The EUV light source itself is researched, developed, and manufactured entirely in California.
ASML is an important company but it is mostly just an integrator of technology from many different countries.
> largely American technology invented by the US government department of energy.
Any references? As far as I know, ASML is as Dutch as it gets.
> ASML is an important company but it is mostly just an integrator of technology from many different countries
yes and no, outside of Cymer, wholly owned subsidiary of ASML, it's mostly European countries:
Core Technology & Mechatronics:
• Netherlands: Houses VDL Groep, Neways Electronics, and Prodrive Technologies
• Germany: ZEISS (precision optics, lenses, and mirrors) and TRUMPF (high-powered CO₂ lasers)
• Belgium
Dunno where your US government department of energy claim comes from...
You can read about the history here if you're interested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUV_lithography
Basically, US DoE invented the core tech and formed a consortium called EUV LLC to further develop the technology. ASML came along much later to acquire SVG in order to gain commercial access to the technology and research. The Dutch company "ASML" didn't actually invent most of it. They are just the integrator.
This is how ASML even describes itself:
> Board member Wayne Allan in 2023: “We're an integrator – we build some of the modules in our machines, but we procure a huge amount of materials and critical components from suppliers, nearly 80% of the components.”
Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
First and foremost, I think you're underestimating the complexity of integrating the most complex technology invented as of date. Just remember High-NA EUV systems require up to 7 freight jets to deliver.
Second of all, EUV isn't everything. There is a lot of "legacy" node demand.
> Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
"Some" of the American. It's funny how you name it first despite it's being the minority.
> As of 2025, ASML is the only company that produces and sells EUV systems for chip production.
This is pretty much everything we need to know.
I was responding to your comment about the US Dept of Energy's role in the history of the technology. Also I quoted ASML executives describing themselves exactly as an integrator, not a developer of the technology. But you seem to be upset about this for some reason.
Not upset at all. I was just surprised to see a lot of credit to the US DoE.
[dead]
Yeah, but so are car manufacturers. A car is greater than the sum of its parts. I'd wager an EUV machine is probably a teensy bit more complicated than a car.
You could say the same about lots of software. You didn't write the programming language, same for libraries and so forth...
I wasn't trying to downplay ASML's important role in the commercialization of the machines. I was just responding to the comment "ASML is as Dutch as it gets" which is not remotely true.
Sounds like a European variation of the "China can't invent anything, they only copy" to me.
> the EU is a tech powerhouse
Lmfao
EU/Europe lead in airspace (Airbus), industrial automation/electronics (Siemens, Schneider, ABB), 5G network infra (Erickson, Nokia), earth observation (Copernicus), wind energy technology, medical image technology, agricultural/greenhouse etc.
People here are in a bubble who think tech is only FAANG and node_modules with JavaScript frameworks.
Airbus and Boeing are neck and neck - but both rely on American jet turbines, either directly or through joint ventures.
The US has orders of magnitude more satellites thanks to SpaceX, including American direct-to-satellite networking.
Medical imaging is another example of where the US wins on scale alone. MRI machines are extremely common here, almost twice as many per capita as the OECD average.
Europe has lots of talent but a really horrible regulatory environment. That's why it's not a "powerhouse" and is instead almost always stuck in second place.
> Airbus and Boeing are neck and neck - but both rely on American jet turbines, either directly or through joint ventures.
Rolls-Royce is 100% British, CFM International is 50% French and together they represent around 30% of the market.
If you insist on going down the "relies on" hole, I am pretty sure you are going to end up back in Europe at some point
Not a single thing you said negates the points you are replying to
So true about node_modules with JavaScript frameworks.
No, it really is in the sense that a lot of technology is developed here. Where things go awry is when someone tries to use that technology to create something and is met by a sheer wall of regulations, taxes, levies, restrictions and demands. This often results in those people jumping over the pond to continue their efforts in the USA. A good example is the development of the first practical electrically driven regional airliner which started off in Göteborg, Sweden: [1] In May 2024, Heart Aerospace announced the establishment of a new research and development hub in Los Angeles focusing on its hybrid-electric propulsion system, and the Forslunds moved there to oversee operations. The company subsequently closed its Swedish operations in 2025 and moved its headquarters to Los Angeles. In interviews with the Forslunds they quote better access to financing, ease of attracting those with the needed knowledge and experience to design and build these aeroplanes, easier access to the required materials and the general attitude towards startup companies. Mind, they're in California, the place where many American companies are fleeing away from due to over-regulation and excessive taxation. Coming from the EU it still seems to win and that is unfortunate.
I think we can do a lot better in this respect but to get there we'll need to scale down the regulatory mammoth which is the EU.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Aerospace
> they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Yes, but... isn't their assumption mostly correct? Spotify and Co have changed the equation in the sense that one doesn't have files anymore but when those laws came out they targeted MP3 players and DVDs who were, indeed, full of pirated media.
I don't like the result for other reasons, but the assumption seemed always relatively accurate.
That is not the reason for this tax, which is called a private copying levy[1], by the way.
The motivation is even more stupid than that, it is to compensate authors for "lost" income due to buyers making private copies of their media, which is thankfully legal. For example, if I accidentally scratch a CD and it doesn't play anymore, I won't buy a new one if I had made a backup.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
Very interesting how eager people are to accept headlines at face value when they support biases, before reading the article or trying to understand what's actually happening.
5 and a half cent per Gb?! Thats pretty wild. I would pay at least 10 euros a month in tax. My friends in EU pay like 50 euros for shitty fiber, will they now need to pay 60? That pretty wild. I am all for light apps and low traffic and perma computing but wow.
Counterpoint: I am behind the gfw.. and seriously dont understand how anyone can get anything done… but it still seems to work… i pay like 2 euros for 500MBit fiber
My Tax would be around 300+80 Euros (Tor Relay)
Holy moly (tor doesnt really work here)
Is everyone you know able to classify a business they run from their home connection as being a "content provider"? That's crazy, I know one person/entity who'd be considered as such.
Judging by the comments here, every single French person runs a CDN at home? What am I missing, or are people completely misunderstanding what this tax is targeting?
it isn‘t a tax in case of Germany but money which is paid to artists (Gema). Before streaming storing music in media was very common, it made sense to compensate for private sharing. It has nothing to do with old people. You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know anything about.
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
There are people who consider this a good thing. I don’t have a strong opinion on it, but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.
>but it’s certainly not obvious to me that this isn’t a good thing.
Because its not a problem for Big-corp, but Opensource-Projects/Tor-Nodes, for example i would have to pay ~10$ a day just for my Tor-Relay. It's deeply Anti-Democratic and the opposite what the Internet should be.
It's not even clear yet if this would include self-hosted stuff like if you host a website for your FOSS project or a Tor relay. What news website you got that from, as the linked session notes doesn't clarify that at all.
The objective seems to be to target fournisseurs de contenu (content providers), and the mentioned collection mechanism identifies a entreprise émettrice (sending company). Also, they talk about "turnover" mattering as well, so if you don't charger people, another reason this might not affect you at all. If neither of those apply, like you hosting a website for a FOSS project, it's unlikely you'd have to pay this tax.
But, this is based on reading the session notes themselves, not news article. I'm happy to be corrected if I misunderstood anything.
If you are right, you can bet that YouTube-France will have Ad's every 2 seconds and Netflix gets really expensive, maybe the French Government really wants Piracy ;)
You mean "it's good that EU will never be a tech powerhouse"? Or you mean "it's good for France to tax large tech companies for internet traffic"?
He means the part he's quoted with the ">" symbol.
It's not obvious that housing "tech powerhouses" is a good thing. I mean look at the US, and how much problems all these companies bring to society. I'm also not sure we'd want anything like that in Europe or EU, if we also need to accept the same consequences as the US did.
IMO Europe is facing most of the consequences and getting almost none of the benefits.
American billionaires are self-made (70% became billionaires during their life) where in Europe 70% inherited it. The powerhouse companies of the European economy are stagnant and the families which held them 100 years ago have a great chance of still holding them.
Are tech billionaires obnoxious? Yes, undoubtedly. I'd take them in a heartbeat over having a more permanent aristocracy.
It completely depends what you want from system and how efficient it will be. Want social protections dialed to 11 (like even small government bureaucrats getting golden parachutes worth 1-2 years of their salary while being otherwise practically un-fireable, regardless if they are actually needed... in fact most perm folks are extremely hard to let go). Or you want strong economic prosperity. Cannot have both, the best mix is Switzerland but French will die sooner to the last person before they would admit somebody did state and laws things better than them and that they should maybe get inspired a bit.
What french public conveniently fails to grasp and loses 100% of my support is the naive expectation that in struggling economy they should be rich, while having social system actually dialed to 12 since that 11 is never enough for them. And have 0 doubt, all the protesters now and also before are at the end after money. Money will magically appear in government budget and in all salaries, prices of petrol/diesel will be magically ultra low regardless of yet another failed war being waged by US causing massive rise in prices globally. If one doesn't travel around the world and just lives there it may feel like a normal default system, but given reality of the world out there its anything but.
Lets talk like adults what is achievable or not and manage expectations accordingly. Not very french way, is it. Any attempt to reform even a bit is met with extreme violence, blocking of economy and other self-harm behavior that ruins the economy further and solves 0 of underlying issues, so most cave in and problems fester. I predict it will get much worse in France before there is chance to get things better again, and how much depends on their ultra comfy, some would even say spoiled population.
Yeah, the tech powerhouse seems to refer to the US. There is no doubt that US dominates a lot of tech at the moments, China dominates a lot of manufacturing.
The US is a failing democracy ruled by ruthless liars and capitalists. China's surveillance and lack of freedom is beyond discussion. So EU not being a tech powerhouse still does not look too bad.
Do you conclude the same about the US when some lawmakers in e.g. Texas propose some insane law rooted in the old testament or something?
You shouldn't. Nor should you conclude anything general about the EU from something French politicans do. It's disingenuous.
Wow it's almost like they're not taxing pirated music at all and are taxing gigabytes. I suppose France is more like a farm of users and they're not entitled to their natural resources because users are inherently slaves to globalized capitalism.
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> Just old people being old people.
Tax their bloody real estate into poverty because that's the only message they'll understand.
At this level, the title is fake news, there is approximately zero chance this go in the final law at this point.
But all usual troll that like to trash talk on Europe at every occasion will be there to add their comment.
Imagine a US House of Representatives passes a law that allows higher taxes for obese people. And someone would say: “lol it’s fake news, it will never pass the senate”. Even if it doesn’t pass the Senate later, it’s huge news now that it passed the House in the first place.
That's not the right way to understand what happened. It's not as in the US with both parties in session and every vote count. It's very common in France for working sessions on technical texts to have very few deputies. Here only 35 where present, and only 21 bothered to vote. And now and then a minority party uses this for a PR coup, passing some text with no real majority while most are away. It has no consequence because it's turned down in the senate never to come back again. But there's always some politician to use such stunt for publicity. It's a nothing burger, but you need to understand how it works in France to get this I guess.
Ok, thanks for explaining
> never to come back again.
Now, you know that bad ideas have an immortality all their own.
This sort of thinking may take on new life in the context of the overall European economic situation => https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2026/10/29/europea...
It seems likely this will never pass esp in this political environment, but maybe legislators should consider the international reputation costs of stupid decisions.
We’re in the era of international stupid decisions, exhibit A - the US
Their job is quite literally to sit in sessions and discuss potential laws, this is what us taxpayers give them money to do. It's not embarrassing to talk about whatever laws, regardless of how stupid because again, this is their job, they're evaluating things.
It'd be embarrassing if they'd actually make this as-is into law, which for obvious reasons wouldn't happen right now, but that hasn't happened yet.
Just like it's not embarrassing for a software developer to write code that has bugs, this happens even to the best of us. What would be embarrassing, would be to have that code deployed as-is to production, with bugs, that's the part we should be vigilant about.
Yet they passed the amendment, so... that is a decision not a discussion.
the amendment passed, no? so it already survived quite a bit of discussions
Yes, repeating my comments from the other time this was disingenuously posted ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50310796 ) , this should be flagged if not removed. The way these posts are being titled is misinformation and rage bait.
It's also disappointing to see how many users here, people who you'd expect to at least have a mild familiarity with the internet and how it works, don't read the article, comments, or sometimes even the entire OP. They see a title that supports their biases, make wild assumptions, and immediately move to spitting vitriol into the comments.
That it made it even this far is ridiculous. I would chalk it up to the "boomer mentality" of out of touch politicians rather that a Europe vs America thing though.
Worth noting the vote for this law passed 11 to 10, and it's an amendment to the budget which is 100% likely to be thrown out anyway.
Yes, and 35 abstentions. For a total of 577 MPs so 521 that were not here.
Glad to hear it might be thrown out.
What a horrible idea. This is like creating a special tax on start up capital. It goes against so many fundamentals, such as increasing efficiency, productivity, automation, carbon. It's just crazy.
This can be seen as a "look europe, we are trying to address our huge debt peoblem (which is 120% of gdp in 2026), please continue to help us". France as well as the French themselves do not want to address the extreme cost of their early pensions to their budget (25% of the 2026 budget!). The retirees and employees often get amazing perks from the government. Employees and retirees of EDF get a 90% discount on their gas and electric bill. 21% of the total workforce works for government... Meanwhile kids can't get a decent education, I would be pissed off too.
Ah, the game of what can be taxed that has the least lobbyists to protect it - it's a game that plays out as a decline for civilizations because government representatives aren't representing the interests of the people of the nation. And because the biggest entities with money have the most lobbyists.
The tax is huge.
Fortunately, I do not live in France.
Otherwise, this tax would cost me at least 50% of what I pay for all my food, daily.
50 GB of daily traffic is normal for me, sometimes even much more, e.g. one day ago I had a traffic of 1 TB per day, because I downloaded the Mistral Large LLM weights. So to download Mistral, I would have had to pay EUR 55, much more than I pay for a month of Internet access.
Here is the actual amendment [1] and also it is not yet law. It's not a tax on individuals using the internet. It's a tax on companies providing content to the customers of ISPs. There is a cap on the tax.
I also don't live in France and think it's dumb but I think we need better information than the topic line to have real discussion of it.
It passed 11 to 10 and has to still pass in the French senate's version of their finance bill and the French government is against it. [2]
[1] https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
[2] https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1750726/article/2026-10-30/l-ass...
It's not a tax on the customer directly, but who does it get passed on to? That's like saying VAT isn't a tax on the customer as the retailer pays it to the state.
The average streaming show would be about €0.20 in tax to watch.
That would make Netflix like 30-50% more expensive.
Why would this even affect you, even if you lived in France? Did you just assume this was about residential download traffic somehow?
What on earth is going on in this comment section? Seems like it's 99% of Americans who obviously didn't read the session notes themselves, or even any background information in English, before commenting on this with their least charitable reading. I don't get it, why?
If you don't understand the thing, probably because you haven't spent even 2 minutes looking up information about it, why comment about some scenario you don't even know if it applies or not? Like what's the point, just to spread FUD for the fun of it?
YouTube is crushing our national TV product, so let's tax YouTube.
It seems... fine.
But legislators are slow and companies are smart, so likely what would happen is something like: 1. Tax goes in place. 2. YouTube decreases the quality and starts broadcasting in 640x480 VGA. 3. France gets pissed. Forces them to 'distribute content at world standards with a law' 4. YouTube challenges the law in court. 5. The case costs the French more than the revenue provided in the meanwhile.
Or YouTube leaves France.
Who is winning here?
France, obviously. YouTube has turned into a cookie cutter slopfest a long time ago anyways.
So two ways to look at tax:
1) How it changes behaviour (taxing something usually means less of that thing is produced, and sometimes you want less of something e.g. smoking as a classic example)
2) How much revenue it raises for the treasury after taking into account 1
I cannot help but think that on both counts this is really bad.
This seems like an absurdly high rate of taxation on a resource that if anything we want to increase the volume of. Creating disincentives for high speed/bandwidth connections and services surely means less economic activity net, which means lower revenues and profits to tax across multiple industries. You are creating very direct disincentives on economic activity in a very blunt way. Its not like you are say taxing online gambling activity which is a net social drain on society, this is everything digital/tech.
I can understand that they want to maybe tax mainly foreign tech and media firms, but this seems like the worst way to go about it with a tax that would make up the bulk of the cost to serve.
French government should buy a bunch of subscriptions like netflix or cheap games on Steam that have large download sizes and just download all day. Pay the monthly $20, then recover 10x that from taxing the CDN.
You can solve your government's finances with this one weird trick!
The link seems to be the minutes of a parliamentary debate about a multitude of topics. It does not explain what this tax is about and I guess there is another approval step in the senate (French is neither my mother tongue nor am I fowolling French politics)
That the current internet with social media and AI boom destroys democracies and the planet is a fact. Whether such tax is a good step to slow that down, I have not thought about.
Additional discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50308240
Is this the 349th? [1] Probably not, they're likely over it already. I'm sure this one will really fix France and make things that much better.
[1] https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/05/30/france-germany-uk-number...
Weird smear.
There are over 10,000 taxing jurisdictions in the US, so good luck with even trying to figure how many different taxes.
Note that it will be for professional content provider, and they especially aim at the 20 biggest platforms, providing free content to France and taking advantage of its national market (think gafam)
This tax should also be capped to a fraction of their benefits.
End users, tor relays, content providers outside fortune x00 are out of scope .
The end user always pays, one way or another.
This feels like a wildly scatter gun way of achieving their goals? The collateral damage will be huge and unpredictable
What are their goals? I'm assuming just to raise revenue?
Is it even a clear problem to figure out which business pays what?
The ISP is responsible for collecting the tax so they would know the sources.
Let's say that traffic (anything: ssh, sftp, http) enters a VPS in OVH in France from a laptop in Italy (Italian ISP) and some bot in the USA (eg googlebot) or some real person download something from that VPS (US ISP). Who's paying what? There are sent and received bytes for all parties.
Only from france-based uploaders , right? This applies also to external ones.
What is the reason? Seems like absolute taxing the wrong thing. It is not attached to any cost for the government, not revenue or income directly and I can't see a reason to put people off using data (like you might do with pollution taxes) so why? (I don't speak or read French).
> What is the reason?
more tax revenue from any source they can imagine. Instead of trying to cut out the welfare, and reign in spending, it's always easier to propose a tax that's small and widespread (so that each individual may not be incentivized to fight it).
So I could troll French visitors of my website by starting a huge data transfer from their browser?
Interesting...
If I am reading the translation correctly, it would be tax on CDNs, so it would be you getting trolled
So only send text to France?
Selectively for those originating from AS60855.
tbh, I don't understand why people are talking trash about this, I don't myself know if this would helps France but this is not a tax of individuals, if is like a border tax on US big corp imported GBs. As usual, from time to time, France look at these companies and shave them a little bit, this is not a surprise.
I know Netflix can raise prices for french people, but this could be also their goal to get other alternative a better chance to compete.
It doesn't seem to apply only to foreign companies or "imported" GBs
And it applies to free services too, which will recover the expense by increasing the ads
vive la France!!!
This will show companies not getting away with those GBs! Everyone should pay for extra, this will save republic for the next 100 years at least, increase it next year to 5€ at least
Well France that sends a signal (not important if that really tax comes).
Don't Invest as a IT-Firm, if power is ~cheap but data expensive....well there are better places.
Pfff... A minority group uses a time where only few deputies are there to pass an amendment with no majority behind. This will go to the senate where it will be removed, and back to the parliament where the majority groups will be more careful.
There is no chance this is going through. It's just posturing really. Posting this just wastes people time. A more accurate title would be "11 deputies vote for ... at a time when 35 people are in session and 21 bothered to vote".
The uploading entity pays, even if not in France.
I feel confident that all of the illegal video hosting companies are going to pay this tax.
Yeah unless they don't, though. They're only going to pay if they actually do business in France. Otherwise there is no legal or practical mechanism for the French government to compel them to pay.
Bonjour! I'm from Kazakhstan. I just uploaded few kibibytes of HTTP requests into elysee.fr. How do I pay for it now? Do they accept VISA? I don't want to evade taxes!
People say it won't be signed as a law, so everyone just chill out.
Doesn't France also have cloud infrastructure that offers similar products like AWS S3?
OVH is quite big. And Scaleway.
And how about CDNs that we use and love? Who's to say we don't serve our customers from France?
I don't see how a business like cloudflare can remain serving French customers.
Back to Minitel it is!
Maybe it'll force the internet to go back to analog.
What the fuck is wrong with France?
I remember, in 2025 friends that were into business said something along the lines of France being socially and economically doomed. I didn't know this much wrong could happen all at once.
Just damn. Riots first. Now absurd laws.
For paid streaming?? Or even YouTube?
Won't YouTube just restrict everyone to 480p unless paying?
This is such a dumb idea I feel shame in their place, or whatever the English expression for that is.
Good chance, and increase the ads in any case
Starlink ftw
This would only apply to "producers" like, for instance, Netflix, not to everything...
This is not final and may well be struck down later, either in new vote or by the Senate.
How long until one of these dipshit regulators are going to FAFO and find their connections to the backbone are severed because no one wants to play with them anymore?
Just stop transferring wealth to hoarding boomers and problems will solve themselves.
Good for them. I assume this is the will of the French people and they are proud of it just like our EU friends here are quite fond of the GDPR.
So if you get DDoSed you can get another huge bill?
The emiter pays, not the receiver
It's less common now, but for many years one of the more popular ways to DDOS someone was to trick a third party into sending them lots of data.
Another comment said it was just some posturing addition to a budget that's already guaranteed to be rejected. Which one is true?
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Tax your fooking billionaires.
Better yet, just stop giving them so much money that they become billionaires.
The situation is the exact opposite of what leftists and europoors think: American billionaires basically fund the US and pay taxes regardless of residence. Whereas in Europe the so-called middle class (1200€/mo pre-tax in the relatively “wealthy” areas where I live) pay the bulk of the taxes, and the wealthy use all kinds of loopholes in order to avoid paying any.
The situation is resulting in this terrible feedback loop of higher taxation, increased regulation, decreased productivity, and increased poverty. And then people turn to socialist politics which just continues to exacerbate the situation.
> American billionaires basically fund the US and pay taxes regardless of residence
US billionaires pay taxes ? Sounds like the start of a a great joke, what's the punchline ?
Remind me, who are those groups of people moving to Florida, Texas or wherever else just so they can escape the California wealth tax which is only a one-time 5% ?
Oh yeah, that's right. The US billionaires who are apparently so diligently willing to pay their taxes.
I said that they pay. Your comment can be summarized as saying “They try to avoid having to pay more.” But this doesn’t contradict what I said.
You said "pay taxes regardless of residence".
Well, if they are residents of California, then they should "pay taxes regardless of residence", i.e. in California ?
Instead, decamping to Florida, Texas or wherever else seems to me very much paying quite a lot of regard to residence ?
They pay regardless of the country they live in. The standard in European countries is that you’re only considered a tax resident if you spend a certain amount of time in the country per year. It’s easy for a wealthy person to avoid paying taxes in Europe, but an American can never avoid it, regardless of residence.
And again, just because they move to a state with lower taxes doesn’t mean they don’t pay taxes. The highest earners in the US pay the vast majority of taxes. This is a fact you can easily look into yourself.