from the tax-the-internet dept

There are times I wonder if the leaders of France and Australia have a secret bet to see which one of them can come up with worse internet policy than the other. Apparently it’s France’s turn. As a few sources have been reporting, French lawmakers slipped an amendment into the country’s budget bill that is (yet another) attempt by a government to justify a tax on big tech… just ’cause big tech is big. As with most of those taxes, they can’t just write a straight “tax the big company” law (because then everyone notices it’s a targeted shakedown), so instead they invent some proxy that ends up hitting everyone else on the internet. That’s why a variety of places (led by Australia) have tried (without much success) to tax links on the internet.

France’s counter is (somehow) even dumber: taxing data by the gigabyte , which (thankfully) is going nowhere for now . But don’t expect it to stay dead.…