France Just Voted an €11 Tax to Download GTA 6 and Your Video Games: Inside the New Law Taxing Every Gigabyte

Fifteen years after France became a global internet punchline with its notorious Hadopi anti-piracy agency, lawmakers in Paris have officially outdone themselves. On Friday, October 30, 2026, in a nearly empty chamber, deputies in France's National Assembly voted 11 to 10 (against the government's recommendation) to adopt Amendment No. I-1358 to the 2027 Finance Bill (No. 3210). Sponsored by Socialist MP Laurent Lhardit and co-signed by his entire parliamentary group (including former French President François Hollande), the text creates a sweeping "Tax on Digital Data Producers" set at €0.055 per gigabyte delivered to French internet users. And because it taxes raw data traffic indiscriminately, it hits everything that uses bandwidth: downloading a 200 GB copy of Grand Theft Auto VI would trigger an €11.00 tax, while watching 4K movies on Netflix, streaming on Twitch, or downloading software and Windows updates would all be metered at the exact same rate.

Hadopi on Steroids: How 11 French MPs Voted to Put a Toll Booth on Every Gigabyte of the Internet

Far from a symbolic resolution, Amendment No. I-1358 writes an entire Chapter XXI directly into the French General Tax Code (Articles 302 bis ZP through 302 bis ZS). Its core mechanism turns France's four major consumer Internet Service Providers (Orange, Free, Bouygues Telecom, and SFR) into bandwidth tax collectors under the supervision of telecom regulator ARCEP and the French tax authority (DGFiP).

Under Article 302 bis ZQ, ISPs must submit quarterly reports identifying every data sender via their registration number with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) along with the exact volume of gigabytes transmitted. Crucially for the entire digital economy, the amendment specifically targets Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) such as Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, and local edge caches operated by Sony, Microsoft, Valve, Netflix, and Apple: "When a data sender uses a content delivery network designed to cache content close to end users, the quantity of data emitted is considered equal to the sum of the flows leaving the delivery network."

Article 302 bis ZR then applies a flat rate of €0.055 (5.5 euro cents) per gigabyte from the very first gigabyte, capped at 15% of the sender's annual revenue generated in France or 2% of its global turnover. Based on ARCEP's estimate of 200 billion gigabytes delivered annually to French subscribers, the lawmakers claim their byte toll will raise €10 billion a year. The vote comes less than 48 hours after parliament debated Bill No. 3169 proposing a state-run "French Steam" operated by the National Library and funded by a 5.15% game tax.

€11 for GTA 6, 4K Movies, Twitch Streams, and Software: Everything That Uses Data Gets Hit

In the official explanatory memorandum attached to Amendment I-1358, the lawmakers explicitly single out video games and video-on-demand as industries that "structurally possess a high ratio of emitted data per euro of revenue." Because the tax meters every gigabyte crossing French fiber lines, virtually every digital activity is caught in the net:

• Video Games on PS5, Xbox, and PC (The GTA 6 Example): With an expected install size of around 200 GB, delivering a single download of Grand Theft Auto VI on PlayStation Network, Xbox, or Steam generates an instant €11.00 tax bill (and buying a physical Blu-ray disc changes nothing when massive Day One downloads are required). Worse still, because a standard PS5 SSD fills up quickly, deleting and reinstalling GTA 6 three times over a year generates 600 GB of traffic , or €33.00 in data tax for a single copy you already bought, piling onto the real cost of playing GTA 6 at launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
• 4K Movies, TV Streaming, and Twitch (Netflix, YouTube, Disney+): A 4K HDR movie or series stream consumes roughly 7 GB per hour. A French household watching 60 hours of 4K streaming per month uses 420 GB, triggering €23.10 per month in bandwidth tax , more than the price of the subscription itself. Watching 60 hours of 1080p60 livestreams on Twitch or YouTube Gaming (180 GB/month) adds another €9.90 per month in tax on free content.
• Software, Operating Systems, and Updates: Downloading a major Windows 11 or macOS update, installing creative software suites (Adobe Creative Cloud, DaVinci Resolve, Unreal Engine 5), or grabbing Nvidia GPU drivers all get metered at 5.5 cents per gigabyte.

"They Just Don't Compress Their Files": The Lawmakers' Comedy-Gold Tech Argument

If the fiscal math is wild, the technical justification written into the amendment's official summary reads like pure satire. According to the MPs, taxing gigabytes at €0.055 is an "ecological public policy virtue" because it will "naturally lead content providers to use the most advanced technologies in data compression and volume optimization. Right now they do not do so, because the network operates for them like a pipe with no volume limit."

Anyone who has ever worked in software development or network engineering will need a moment to process that sentence. CDN bandwidth already costs Sony, Microsoft, Valve, Netflix, and Google hundreds of millions of dollars. That is the exact reason why Sony engineered custom silicon inside the PS5 to accelerate Oodle Kraken decompression, why Microsoft built DirectStorage, and why streaming giants spent years rolling out the AV1 video codec. Blockbuster games and 4K streams are not large because engineers are lazy; they are already compressed to the mathematical limit of lossless and perceptual coding.

Even better, the amendment openly admits how the bill will be passed down to consumers: "Transit providers and CDNs have no obligation to name their clients. They re-invoice the tax or not according to their terms of sale." In practice, Akamai, Cloudflare, or AWS would receive a tax bill from the French treasury and immediately pass that €0.055/GB surcharge onto Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Netflix, Twitch, and software vendors , who would inevitably hike French prices, cap French video streams at 720p, or charge a fee for reinstalling your own games.

My Take

We thought French political tech illiteracy peaked fifteen years ago with Hadopi, when lawmakers seriously debated installing a government "OpenOffice firewall" on home computers. Clearly, we underestimated them. On Wednesday, parliamentarians proposed a 5.15% tax on games and consoles so the National Library could build a state-owned rival to Steam. Less than 48 hours later, eleven MPs took advantage of a Friday session to vote in a literal toll booth on every gigabyte of games, movies, Twitch streams, and software updates entering French homes, convinced that Rockstar Games, Valve, and Netflix only ship large files because their engineers haven't discovered WinRAR yet.

Let's be realistic: passed 11-to-10 against the government's wishes during first-reading budget debates, Amendment I-1358 will almost certainly be stripped out by the Senate or wiped away in the final budget bill. Still, the fact that an entire parliamentary group wrote, signed, and voted for a law that slaps an €11 tax on downloading GTA 6, €23 a month on watching 4K movies, and €5.50 on updating your PC software is a monument to out-of-touch policymaking.

Written by Charles "Grimtag"

Founder & Editor-in-Chief

SEO consultant for over 20 years and digital entrepreneur, Charles "Grimtag" is the founder of Pro-Gamer.gg, Retrocharting.com, and Gamescharting.com. A competitive gamer, streamer, and retro game collector, he has worked in the video game industry for over 15 years, notably as a consultant for leading game price comparison platforms. Passionate about real-time performance data and gaming technology, he analyzes competitive esports, gaming hardware benchmarks, and creator workflows on Pro-Gamer.gg with an authentic player perspective.

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