France's gigabyte tax turns on its own: OVHcloud puts its bill at up to €70m as French tech rounds on MPs

02/11/2026
16
Abstract illustration of blue, white and red data streams passing through a meter that counts euro coins on the way to a hexagon shape

A levy of 5.5 cents per gigabyte, voted through by 11 deputies in a near-empty National Assembly, was pitched as a way to make US platforms pay. Two days on, the loudest objections come from France's own champions: OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba says his company would owe €23m to €70m a year, the non-profit behind VLC fears a seven-figure bill, and Free founder Xavier Niel has called the authors "ignorant incompetents" (translated).

Follow-up to our report of 31 October on the vote.

France's proposed tax on internet traffic was sold as a bill for Silicon Valley. The first detailed estimates of who would pay it point closer to home.

On Saturday, Octave Klaba, founder and chief executive of Roubaix-based cloud provider OVHcloud, published his own calculation on X. OVHcloud sends roughly 500 Gbps to French internet providers at the 95th percentile, about 324 Gbps on average, he wrote. At €0.055 per gigabyte, that would mean a gross tax of about €70m a year. After the amendment's cap, which limits the levy to 15% of French revenue or 2% of worldwide revenue, he put the bill at between €23m and €70m a year, "which we would have to collect for the State, and therefore pass on to our customers" (translated). The figures were first reported in French by MacGeneration and KultureGeek.

The lower end is consistent with OVHcloud's accounts. The company reported revenue of €1.145bn for the year to 31 August 2026, 48% of it in France, according to KultureGeek; 2% of that is about €22.9m.

A tax on bandwidth, priced above bandwidth

Klaba's sharper point is about scale. A 100 Gbps port from a global transit provider costs about €6,300 a month, he wrote; at typical utilisation, the tax on the traffic through that port would exceed €1m a month. Against hyperscalers' own egress prices of roughly €0.045 to €0.08 per gigabyte, the levy would add 68% to 123%. He also argued the measure creates "a distortion of competition at the expense of national players" (translated), because foreign rivals without a French presence would in practice escape it.

That last claim deserves scrutiny. The amendment text does include a mechanism for groups with no French entity: the tax authority issues a notice by 30 January and payment is due by 30 March. How it would be enforced against companies with no assets in France is not spelled out.

Non-profits and founders join in

VideoLAN, the non-profit that develops the VLC media player, was first to react, hours after Friday's vote. In English on X, it said MPs had voted "a tax, that they don't understand, which would cost VideoLAN more than 1 million euro per year". When amendment author Laurent Lhardit replied that the revenue cap would protect it, the association pointed out that the text has no exemption for non-profits or open-source projects.

Xavier Niel, founder of Iliad, whose Free network would be among the internet providers required to meter and report the traffic, wrote: "They are ignorant incompetents" (translated), adding that they "know nothing other than creating new taxes" (translated), Les Numériques reported. Ledger co-founder Éric Larchevêque translated the rate into consumer terms: up to €0.77 of gross tax on a two-hour 4K film, €8.25 on a 150 GB game download.

Lhardit, a Socialist, has defended the measure, arguing it would push platforms to compress content better and, according to a clip shared by journalist Raphaël Grably, that it could not be passed on to users of a "free" service such as Facebook (translated).

What happens next

Amendment I-1358 to the 2027 budget passed on 30 October by 11 votes to 10, with 14 abstentions, according to the Assembly's vote record compiled by Datan. Only 35 of 577 deputies took part. The government, through public accounts minister David Amiel, and general rapporteur Philippe Juvin both opposed it. Its authors estimate annual revenue of about €10bn, a figure for which no detailed methodology has been published.

The vote is not final. Les Numériques reports that the Assembly is due to vote on the whole revenue section of the budget on 3 November. The Senate can then remove or rewrite the measure, and the government can leave it out of the final text.

For European tech, the episode is a warning about how "make Big Tech pay" measures land. A levy on a gigabyte cannot tell a streaming giant from a sovereign cloud provider or a volunteer-run video player, and the first French firms to do the arithmetic have found they are on the bill too.

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France's gigabyte tax turns on its own: OVHcloud puts its bill at up to €70m as French tech rounds on MPs

02/11/2026
16
Abstract illustration of blue, white and red data streams passing through a meter that counts euro coins on the way to a hexagon shape

A levy of 5.5 cents per gigabyte, voted through by 11 deputies in a near-empty National Assembly, was pitched as a way to make US platforms pay. Two days on, the loudest objections come from France's own champions: OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba says his company would owe €23m to €70m a year, the non-profit behind VLC fears a seven-figure bill, and Free founder Xavier Niel has called the authors "ignorant incompetents" (translated).

Follow-up to our report of 31 October on the vote.

France's proposed tax on internet traffic was sold as a bill for Silicon Valley. The first detailed estimates of who would pay it point closer to home.

On Saturday, Octave Klaba, founder and chief executive of Roubaix-based cloud provider OVHcloud, published his own calculation on X. OVHcloud sends roughly 500 Gbps to French internet providers at the 95th percentile, about 324 Gbps on average, he wrote. At €0.055 per gigabyte, that would mean a gross tax of about €70m a year. After the amendment's cap, which limits the levy to 15% of French revenue or 2% of worldwide revenue, he put the bill at between €23m and €70m a year, "which we would have to collect for the State, and therefore pass on to our customers" (translated). The figures were first reported in French by MacGeneration and KultureGeek.

The lower end is consistent with OVHcloud's accounts. The company reported revenue of €1.145bn for the year to 31 August 2026, 48% of it in France, according to KultureGeek; 2% of that is about €22.9m.

A tax on bandwidth, priced above bandwidth

Klaba's sharper point is about scale. A 100 Gbps port from a global transit provider costs about €6,300 a month, he wrote; at typical utilisation, the tax on the traffic through that port would exceed €1m a month. Against hyperscalers' own egress prices of roughly €0.045 to €0.08 per gigabyte, the levy would add 68% to 123%. He also argued the measure creates "a distortion of competition at the expense of national players" (translated), because foreign rivals without a French presence would in practice escape it.

That last claim deserves scrutiny. The amendment text does include a mechanism for groups with no French entity: the tax authority issues a notice by 30 January and payment is due by 30 March. How it would be enforced against companies with no assets in France is not spelled out.

Non-profits and founders join in

VideoLAN, the non-profit that develops the VLC media player, was first to react, hours after Friday's vote. In English on X, it said MPs had voted "a tax, that they don't understand, which would cost VideoLAN more than 1 million euro per year". When amendment author Laurent Lhardit replied that the revenue cap would protect it, the association pointed out that the text has no exemption for non-profits or open-source projects.

Xavier Niel, founder of Iliad, whose Free network would be among the internet providers required to meter and report the traffic, wrote: "They are ignorant incompetents" (translated), adding that they "know nothing other than creating new taxes" (translated), Les Numériques reported. Ledger co-founder Éric Larchevêque translated the rate into consumer terms: up to €0.77 of gross tax on a two-hour 4K film, €8.25 on a 150 GB game download.

Lhardit, a Socialist, has defended the measure, arguing it would push platforms to compress content better and, according to a clip shared by journalist Raphaël Grably, that it could not be passed on to users of a "free" service such as Facebook (translated).

What happens next

Amendment I-1358 to the 2027 budget passed on 30 October by 11 votes to 10, with 14 abstentions, according to the Assembly's vote record compiled by Datan. Only 35 of 577 deputies took part. The government, through public accounts minister David Amiel, and general rapporteur Philippe Juvin both opposed it. Its authors estimate annual revenue of about €10bn, a figure for which no detailed methodology has been published.

The vote is not final. Les Numériques reports that the Assembly is due to vote on the whole revenue section of the budget on 3 November. The Senate can then remove or rewrite the measure, and the government can leave it out of the final text.

For European tech, the episode is a warning about how "make Big Tech pay" measures land. A levy on a gigabyte cannot tell a streaming giant from a sovereign cloud provider or a volunteer-run video player, and the first French firms to do the arithmetic have found they are on the bill too.

Sources

Recent

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