Hats off to the French National Assembly, which has examined a country that famously leaves nothing untaxed and found, at last, one thing still crossing its borders for free: the gigabyte. Last Friday, in the first reading of the 2027 budget, deputies adopted amendment I-1358, a Socialist proposal that would charge content providers €0.055 for every gigabyte of data they send to users in France. Netflix, Google, Meta, Amazon: welcome to customs.

The margin was eleven votes to ten. The Assembly has 577 seats, so the fiscal future of the French internet was settled by 21 people, one short of two football teams. The government opposed it. The general rapporteur of the budget opposed it. An identical text had already been rejected in the finance committee on 9 October. In most professions, losing in committee is a verdict. At the Palais Bourbon it is a dress rehearsal.

The mechanics are a small masterpiece. Internet providers would measure how much data each sender pushes into France, under the supervision of Arcep and the tax administration, without recording the content or the destination. So the state will count every byte you receive while solemnly promising it has no idea what any of them are. The bill would be capped at 15 percent of a company's French turnover or 2 percent of its worldwide turnover, a ceiling so high it is really a mezzanine.

Laurent Lhardit, the Socialist deputy who signed it first, says it could raise €10 billion a year. At 5.5 cents a gigabyte, that means invoicing roughly 182 billion gigabytes every year. Download a 150 GB video game and €8.25 of tax has left the building before the title screen. Monsieur Lhardit, one small detail: when Netflix receives a bill for every episode you fell asleep in front of, who exactly do you picture paying it in next year's subscription? Spoiler: not Netflix.

The minister for public accounts, David Amiel, is not convinced either. He doubts it can be done at all, and estimates that roughly half of the money would come not from the American giants but from smaller content providers, French ones included. So the tax on Silicon Valley is, by the government's own arithmetic, half a tax on Lyon. Spare a thought for the French start-up that must now meter its own video player while Google's lawyers enjoy a quiet weekend in Dublin.

First France taxed digital services. Then it went after streaming platforms to fund French cinema. Now, for the finale, it taxes the pipe itself, by weight, like coal. Somewhere a civil servant is drafting the form, and it will be a PDF of several megabytes.

Relax, it is not law yet. The amendment still has to survive the vote on the revenue half of the budget and then the Senate, where measures passed by one vote on a Friday have a way of quietly disappearing. In France, a tax adopted 11 to 10 is not a policy. It is a mood that found a number.

Somewhere in Paris, a deputy is already weighing this sentence by the byte.