VideoLAN: France’s proposed gigabyte tax would cost VLC over €1 million a year
VideoLAN says France’s proposed 5.5-cent gigabyte tax would cost VLC over €1 million a year. MP Laurent Lhardit says the levy won’t apply to the association.
Source: Clubic
VideoLAN, the French non-profit association behind the VLC media player, said on Friday, October 30, that a new per-gigabyte tax adopted by French MPs the same day would cost it more than €1 million a year.
The measure, amendment No. I-1358 to France’s 2027 budget, charges 5.5 euro cents for every gigabyte that companies send to subscribers in France. VideoLAN, whose player has passed 7 billion downloads, estimates it ships just over 18 million gigabytes a year to French users, counting every download and every security update.
In a post on X, the association addressed Socialist MP Laurent Lhardit, who sponsored the text, asking whether he and his colleagues were “probably the most ignorant politicians on Earth”.
Lhardit, of the Socialistes et apparentés group, replied on X that “VideoLAN is talking nonsense”, arguing that the tax is capped and would not apply to the association at all. He urged it to “read the amendment before following the pack”. A community note added to his post stated that no exemption covers VideoLAN or associations.
The amendment caps the levy at 15% of turnover in France or 2% of total turnover, but provides no exemption for associations or free software and no minimum threshold. VideoLAN countered that the MP was confusing revenue with profit: for a non-profit that makes no surplus, taking 15% of receipts means losing 15% of its budget.
The text targets any “content provider” identified by internet access providers, a definition that could also reach the Wikimedia Foundation and Linux distributions such as Debian. Its explanatory statement names only Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai, said to account for half the traffic measured by the regulator Arcep.
The tax is not yet in force. MPs must still vote on the full revenue section of the budget before it goes to the Senate, and the government, which opposes the measure, could drop it by invoking Article 49.3. A decree would then have to set how each sender’s traffic is measured.
