Bonjour! I'm from Kazakhstan. I just uploaded few kibibytes of HTTP requests into elysee.fr. How do I pay for it now? Do they accept VISA? I don't want to evade taxes!
Yeah unless they don't, though. They're only going to pay if they actually do business in France. Otherwise there is no legal or practical mechanism for the French government to compel them to pay.
The situation is the exact opposite of what leftists and europoors think: American billionaires basically fund the US and pay taxes regardless of residence. Whereas in Europe the so-called middle class (1200€/mo pre-tax in the relatively “wealthy” areas where I live) pay the bulk of the taxes, and the wealthy use all kinds of loopholes in order to avoid paying any.
The situation is resulting in this terrible feedback loop of higher taxation, increased regulation, decreased productivity, and increased poverty. And then people turn to socialist politics which just continues to exacerbate the situation.
This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
> Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Mind you we have a hungarian private torrent tracker with 400k users and 2.7 petabyte of data running since 2005. Virtually everyone is using it in the country but no one really wants to shut it down because at this point it's also a cultural archive.
> This is why the EU will never be a tech powerhouse, the culture is just not there.
Yes, France is in the EU. However, the actions of France do not equate to the actions of the EU.
Despite what pro-Brexit type people will tell you, there is a lot of sovereignty in local laws within the EU. And the ability to set your own taxes is one of them.
Wow it's almost like they're not taxing pirated music at all and are taxing gigabytes. I suppose France is more like a farm of users and they're not entitled to their natural resources because users are inherently slaves to globalized capitalism.
This is quite stupid, but I really wish those who are quick to jump on a ridiculous piece of legislation as supposed proof of Europe's downfall would be as critical discussing consequences of underregulation.
Where exactly do you see under regulation? Everywhere i look i see massive over regulation. If you mean under enforcement of antitruat law so obviously stupid oligopolies are rampant instead of shattered into hundreds of pieces, i guess i could agree with that but thats not regulation, thats destruction of the bad end product of capitalism so that the amazing middle of capitalism can thrive.
Btw, the EU is a tech powerhouse, you just don't know that. ASML, Zeiss, TRUMPF, etc. have full monopoly on eUV lithography and majority of the market on any other nodes. Just one example.
Airbus leads with about 55%–60% of the active narrow and wide-body commercial aircraft market. Airbus has much better track record and doesn't collide with FAA
and doesn't "skimp" on development and QA (I'm looking at you MCAS!).
The culture is right there, we are taking our sweet time.
EU/Europe lead in airspace (Airbus), industrial automation/electronics (Siemens, Schneider, ABB), 5G network infra (Erickson, Nokia), earth observation (Copernicus), wind energy technology, medical image technology, agricultural/greenhouse etc.
People here are in a bubble who think tech is only FAANG and node_modules with JavaScript frameworks.
Airbus and Boeing are neck and neck - but both rely on American jet turbines, either directly or through joint ventures.
The US has orders of magnitude more satellites thanks to SpaceX, including American direct-to-satellite networking.
Medical imaging is another example of where the US wins on scale alone. MRI machines are extremely common here, almost twice as many per capita as the OECD average.
Europe has lots of talent but a really horrible regulatory environment. That's why it's not a "powerhouse" and is instead almost always stuck in second place.
Which says nothing about whether they ought to be, or whether our healthcare is better for having them. Needless imaging is a massive cost drain in the industry.
Let's please stop using healthcare examples when we don't understand healthcare.
Speaking of JavaScript frameworks, Google's v8 was developed in Aarhus, Denmark by Lars Bak and the team; TypeScript is architected by Anders Hejlsberg, Danish.
No, it really is in the sense that a lot of technology is developed here. Where things go awry is when someone tries to use that technology to create something and is met by a sheer wall of regulations, taxes, levies, restrictions and demands. This often results in those people jumping over the pond to continue their efforts in the USA. A good example is the development of the first practical electrically driven regional airliner which started off in Göteborg, Sweden: [1] In May 2024, Heart Aerospace announced the establishment of a new research and development hub in Los Angeles focusing on its hybrid-electric propulsion system, and the Forslunds moved there to oversee operations. The company subsequently closed its Swedish operations in 2025 and moved its headquarters to Los Angeles. In interviews with the Forslunds they quote better access to financing, ease of attracting those with the needed knowledge and experience to design and build these aeroplanes, easier access to the required materials and the general attitude towards startup companies. Mind, they're in California, the place where many American companies are fleeing away from due to over-regulation and excessive taxation. Coming from the EU it still seems to win and that is unfortunate.
I think we can do a lot better in this respect but to get there we'll need to scale down the regulatory mammoth which is the EU.
ASML isn't a great example since it's largely American technology invented by the US government department of energy. The EUV light source itself is researched, developed, and manufactured entirely in California.
ASML is an important company but it is mostly just an integrator of technology from many different countries.
Basically, US DoE invented the core tech and formed a consortium called EUV LLC to further develop the technology. ASML came along much later to acquire SVG in order to gain commercial access to the technology and research. The Dutch company "ASML" didn't actually invent most of it. They are just the integrator.
This is how ASML even describes itself:
> Board member Wayne Allan in 2023:
“We're an integrator – we build some of the modules in our machines, but we procure a huge amount of materials and critical components from suppliers, nearly 80% of the components.”
Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
First and foremost, I think you're underestimating the complexity of integrating the most complex technology invented as of date. Just remember High-NA EUV systems require up to 7 freight jets to deliver.
Second of all, EUV isn't everything. There is a lot of "legacy" node demand.
> Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
"Some" of the American. It's funny how you name it first despite it's being the minority.
> As of 2025, ASML is the only company that produces and sells EUV systems for chip production.
Yeah, but so are car manufacturers. A car is greater than the sum of its parts. I'd wager an EUV machine is probably a teensy bit more complicated than a car.
You could say the same about lots of software. You didn't write the programming language, same for libraries and so forth...
I wasn't trying to downplay ASML's important role in the commercialization of the machines. I was just responding to the comment "ASML is as Dutch as it gets" which is not remotely true.
> "ASML is as Dutch as it gets" which is not remotely true.
This statement is either ignorant or stupid. You choose which one it is.
ASML has its headquarters in Veldhoven, Netherlands, around 60% of workforce is based around that area. It's a spin-off from Philips, another iconic Dutch electronics company.
Yes, the corporate entity is Dutch. The technology is not Dutch. ASML's own executives report that 80% of the tech does not originate from ASML, or even the Netherlands at all. This is what we're talking about.
In America it comes largely from California, New York, and Connecticut, as well as Germany, Japan, and elsewhere.
I mean, Toyota is as Japanese as it gets even if Toyota did not invent the original technology for the automobile. And a Kei is uniquely Japanese kind of car. Same for Sony and audio equipment. So I'm not sure I agree.
If you are trying to say EUV is not Dutch, I'm not sure anyone is disagreeing with that.
it isn‘t a tax in case of Germany but money which is paid to artists (Gema). Before streaming storing music in media was very common, it made sense to compensate for private sharing.
It has nothing to do with old people. You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know anything about.
Very interesting how eager people are to accept headlines at face value when they support biases, before reading the article or trying to understand what's actually happening.
I agree with part of your point, but it also depends on what you call a powerhouse. It has its advantages and disadvantages.
It's true that today Europe relies more on the outside for a lot of tech than the opposite, but it's changing and it's not the only measure of quality.
But I especially think your last point about old people is really both false and irrelevant. If I wanted to troll, I could say it's really dumb, just americans being americans.
Otherwise, this tax would cost me at least 50% of what I pay for all my food, daily.
50 GB of daily traffic is normal for me, sometimes even much more, e.g. one day ago I had a traffic of 1 TB per day, because I downloaded the Mistral Large LLM weights. So to download Mistral, I would have had to pay EUR 55, much more than I pay for a month of Internet access.
Here is the actual amendment [1] and also it is not yet law. It's not a tax on individuals using the internet. It's a tax on companies providing content to the customers of ISPs. There is a cap on the tax.
I also don't live in France and think it's dumb but I think we need better information than the topic line to have real discussion of it.
It passed 11 to 10 and has to still pass in the French senate's version of their finance bill and the French government is against it. [2]
It's not a tax on the customer directly, but who does it get passed on to? That's like saying VAT isn't a tax on the customer as the retailer pays it to the state.
Why would this even affect you, even if you lived in France? Did you just assume this was about residential download traffic somehow?
What on earth is going on in this comment section? Seems like it's 99% of Americans who obviously didn't read the session notes themselves, or even any background information in English, before commenting on this with their least charitable reading. I don't get it, why?
If you don't understand the thing, probably because you haven't spent even 2 minutes looking up information about it, why comment about some scenario you don't even know if it applies or not? Like what's the point, just to spread FUD for the fun of it?
Anti Europe propaganda has ramped up on HN in the past few years. The right in the US is destroying their country so they need to point at and lie about other systems to appease their base.
What is the reason? Seems like absolute taxing the wrong thing. It is not attached to any cost for the government, not revenue or income directly and I can't see a reason to put people off using data (like you might do with pollution taxes) so why? (I don't speak or read French).
The link seems to be the minutes of a parliamentary debate about a multitude of topics. It does not explain what this tax is about and I guess there is another approval step in the senate (French is neither my mother tongue nor am I fowolling French politics)
That the current internet with social media and AI boom destroys democracies and the planet is a fact. Whether such tax is a good step to slow that down, I have not thought about.
This will show companies not getting away with those GBs! Everyone should pay for extra, this will save republic for the next 100 years at least, increase it next year to 5€ at least
1) How it changes behaviour (taxing something usually means less of that thing is produced)
2) How much revenue it raises for the treasury
I cannot help but think that on both counts this is really bad.
This seems like an absurdly high rate of taxation on a resource that if anything we want to increase the volume of. Creating disincentives for high speed/bandwidth connections and services surely means less economic activity net, which means lower revenues and profits to tax. You are creating very direct disincentives on economic activity in a very blunt way. Its not like you are say taxing online gambling activity which is a net social drain on society, this is everything digital/tech.
I can understand that they want to maybe tax mainly foreign tech and media firms, but this seems like the worst way to go about it.
This can be seen as a "look europe, we are trying to address our huge debt peoblem (which is 120% of gdp in 2026), please continue to help us". France as well as the French themselves do not want to address the extreme cost of their early pensions to their budget (25% of the 2026 budget!). The retirees and employees often get amazing perks from the government. Employees and retirees of EDF get a 90% discount on their gas and electric bill. 21% of the total workforce works for government... Meanwhile kids can't get a decent education, I would be pissed off too.
I remember, in 2025 friends that were into business said something along the lines of France being socially and economically doomed. I didn't know this much wrong could happen all at once.
How long until one of these dipshit regulators are going to FAFO and find their connections to the backbone are severed because no one wants to play with them anymore?
Imagine a US House of Representatives passes a law that allows higher taxes for obese people. And someone would say: “lol it’s fake news, it will never pass the senate”. Even if it doesn’t pass the Senate later, it’s huge news now that it passed the House in the first place.
That's not the right way to understand what happened. It's not as in the US with both parties in session and every vote count. It's very common in France for working sessions on technical texts to have very few deputies. Here only 35 where present, and only 21 bothered to vote. And now and then a minority party uses this for a PR coup, passing some text with no real majority while most are away. It has no consequence because it's turned down in the senate never to come back again. But there's always some politician to use such stunt for publicity. It's a nothing burger, but you need to understand how it works in France to get this I guess.
That it made it even this far is ridiculous. I would chalk it up to the "boomer mentality" of out of touch politicians rather that a Europe vs America thing though.
Yes, repeating my comments from the other time this was disingenuously posted ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50310796 ) , this should be flagged if not removed. The way these posts are being titled is misinformation and rage bait.
It's also disappointing to see how many users here, people who you'd expect to at least have a mild familiarity with the internet and how it works, don't read the article, comments, or sometimes even the entire OP. They see a title that supports their biases, make wild assumptions, and immediately move to spitting vitriol into the comments.
99 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 375 ms ] threadIs it even a clear problem to figure out which business pays what?
The situation is resulting in this terrible feedback loop of higher taxation, increased regulation, decreased productivity, and increased poverty. And then people turn to socialist politics which just continues to exacerbate the situation.
Some EU countries even charge you a copyright tax when you buy a smartphone per gigabyte because they just assume that you'll fill every gigabyte with pirated music.
Just old people being old people.
I live in Hungary where this is common but it's more like a "you pay tax for storage which goes to the labels, in turn we don't prosecute piracy" https://www.artisjus.hu/english/copyright-in-hungary/
Mind you we have a hungarian private torrent tracker with 400k users and 2.7 petabyte of data running since 2005. Virtually everyone is using it in the country but no one really wants to shut it down because at this point it's also a cultural archive.
Prosecuting “piracy” is sold in as a free trade deal requirement with the US
Yes, France is in the EU. However, the actions of France do not equate to the actions of the EU.
Despite what pro-Brexit type people will tell you, there is a lot of sovereignty in local laws within the EU. And the ability to set your own taxes is one of them.
Btw, the EU is a tech powerhouse, you just don't know that. ASML, Zeiss, TRUMPF, etc. have full monopoly on eUV lithography and majority of the market on any other nodes. Just one example.
Airbus leads with about 55%–60% of the active narrow and wide-body commercial aircraft market. Airbus has much better track record and doesn't collide with FAA and doesn't "skimp" on development and QA (I'm looking at you MCAS!).
The culture is right there, we are taking our sweet time.
Lmfao
People here are in a bubble who think tech is only FAANG and node_modules with JavaScript frameworks.
The US has orders of magnitude more satellites thanks to SpaceX, including American direct-to-satellite networking.
Medical imaging is another example of where the US wins on scale alone. MRI machines are extremely common here, almost twice as many per capita as the OECD average.
Europe has lots of talent but a really horrible regulatory environment. That's why it's not a "powerhouse" and is instead almost always stuck in second place.
Rolls-Royce is 100% British, CFM International is 50% French and together they represent around 30% of the market.
Which says nothing about whether they ought to be, or whether our healthcare is better for having them. Needless imaging is a massive cost drain in the industry.
Let's please stop using healthcare examples when we don't understand healthcare.
I think we can do a lot better in this respect but to get there we'll need to scale down the regulatory mammoth which is the EU.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Aerospace
ASML is an important company but it is mostly just an integrator of technology from many different countries.
Any references? As far as I know, ASML is as Dutch as it gets.
> ASML is an important company but it is mostly just an integrator of technology from many different countries
yes and no, outside of Cymer, wholly owned subsidiary of ASML, it's mostly European countries:
Core Technology & Mechatronics:
• Netherlands: Houses VDL Groep, Neways Electronics, and Prodrive Technologies
• Germany: ZEISS (precision optics, lenses, and mirrors) and TRUMPF (high-powered CO₂ lasers)
• Belgium
Dunno where your US government department of energy claim comes from...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUV_lithography
Basically, US DoE invented the core tech and formed a consortium called EUV LLC to further develop the technology. ASML came along much later to acquire SVG in order to gain commercial access to the technology and research. The Dutch company "ASML" didn't actually invent most of it. They are just the integrator.
This is how ASML even describes itself:
> Board member Wayne Allan in 2023: “We're an integrator – we build some of the modules in our machines, but we procure a huge amount of materials and critical components from suppliers, nearly 80% of the components.”
Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
Second of all, EUV isn't everything. There is a lot of "legacy" node demand.
> Most of the valuable tech comes from American, German, and Japanese companies.
"Some" of the American. It's funny how you name it first despite it's being the minority.
> As of 2025, ASML is the only company that produces and sells EUV systems for chip production.
This is pretty much everything we need to know.
You could say the same about lots of software. You didn't write the programming language, same for libraries and so forth...
ASML has its headquarters in Veldhoven, Netherlands, around 60% of workforce is based around that area. It's a spin-off from Philips, another iconic Dutch electronics company.
How is it not Dutch?
In America it comes largely from California, New York, and Connecticut, as well as Germany, Japan, and elsewhere.
If you are trying to say EUV is not Dutch, I'm not sure anyone is disagreeing with that.
But I especially think your last point about old people is really both false and irrelevant. If I wanted to troll, I could say it's really dumb, just americans being americans.
Fortunately, I do not live in France.
Otherwise, this tax would cost me at least 50% of what I pay for all my food, daily.
50 GB of daily traffic is normal for me, sometimes even much more, e.g. one day ago I had a traffic of 1 TB per day, because I downloaded the Mistral Large LLM weights. So to download Mistral, I would have had to pay EUR 55, much more than I pay for a month of Internet access.
I also don't live in France and think it's dumb but I think we need better information than the topic line to have real discussion of it.
It passed 11 to 10 and has to still pass in the French senate's version of their finance bill and the French government is against it. [2]
[1] https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...
[2] https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1750726/article/2026-10-30/l-ass...
What on earth is going on in this comment section? Seems like it's 99% of Americans who obviously didn't read the session notes themselves, or even any background information in English, before commenting on this with their least charitable reading. I don't get it, why?
If you don't understand the thing, probably because you haven't spent even 2 minutes looking up information about it, why comment about some scenario you don't even know if it applies or not? Like what's the point, just to spread FUD for the fun of it?
That the current internet with social media and AI boom destroys democracies and the planet is a fact. Whether such tax is a good step to slow that down, I have not thought about.
Interesting...
This will show companies not getting away with those GBs! Everyone should pay for extra, this will save republic for the next 100 years at least, increase it next year to 5€ at least
1) How it changes behaviour (taxing something usually means less of that thing is produced)
2) How much revenue it raises for the treasury
I cannot help but think that on both counts this is really bad.
This seems like an absurdly high rate of taxation on a resource that if anything we want to increase the volume of. Creating disincentives for high speed/bandwidth connections and services surely means less economic activity net, which means lower revenues and profits to tax. You are creating very direct disincentives on economic activity in a very blunt way. Its not like you are say taxing online gambling activity which is a net social drain on society, this is everything digital/tech.
I can understand that they want to maybe tax mainly foreign tech and media firms, but this seems like the worst way to go about it.
I remember, in 2025 friends that were into business said something along the lines of France being socially and economically doomed. I didn't know this much wrong could happen all at once.
Just damn. Riots first. Now absurd laws.
But all usual troll that like to trash talk on Europe at every occasion will be there to add their comment.
Now, you know that bad ideas have an immortality all their own.
This sort of thinking may take on new life in the context of the overall European economic situation => https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2026/10/29/europea...
It's also disappointing to see how many users here, people who you'd expect to at least have a mild familiarity with the internet and how it works, don't read the article, comments, or sometimes even the entire OP. They see a title that supports their biases, make wild assumptions, and immediately move to spitting vitriol into the comments.
This is not final and may well be struck down later, either in new vote or by the Senate.