France's gigabyte tax is coming for your SaaS renewal, so make vendors itemise it

Eleven deputies voted for it and ten against. On that margin, the Assemblée nationale adopted amendment I-1358, which would charge content providers €0.055 for every gigabyte delivered to users in France. Its Socialist sponsors hope it will raise up to €10 billion. The consumer press has already done the sums for gamers, putting a copy of GTA VI at about €12. I want to do them for the people who sign B2B contracts, because that is where I expect this tax to hide.

The article's list of services in scope reads like a mid-sized company's vendor register. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. GitHub and Hugging Face. Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive. Teams and Zoom. And, with a section of their own in the amendment text, the content delivery networks: Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly. Almost every SaaS product you buy sits on one of those, and many sit on several. The proposed Article 302 bis ZR of the tax code would have internet providers meter each company's traffic every quarter, with Arcep and the DGFiP checking their work.

When I first read it I expected buyers to shrug and wait for the Senate to kill it. I now think that is the expensive option. A per-gigabyte levy charged to clouds and CDNs gets passed down the chain to the SaaS vendor, and the SaaS vendor then has a choice. It can show you the charge, or it can fold it into a renewal uplift and blame rising infrastructure costs. The second route suits the vendor in every scenario I can model. If the tax passes, the vendor recovers it. If the tax is cut, capped harder or dropped, the uplift stays in the base price and compounds with every future increase, because buyers rarely go back and reopen a price rise that nobody ever explained to them.

The cap makes this murkier for buyers. The amendment limits the bill to 15% of a company's French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue, to spare services that move a lot of data on thin margins. So two suppliers pushing identical volumes to France could owe very different sums depending on their size and where they book revenue. A giant that hits the 2% ceiling could end up paying far less per gigabyte than a smaller hosting firm paying the full €0.055. If the charge reaches you as a vague surcharge, you have no way to tell whether your vendor is passing on the tax it actually paid or the theoretical maximum.

There is also a double-counting risk I would want answered in writing. The text pulls in CDNs because so much traffic leaves relay servers close to the user rather than the origin server. For a gigabyte served to your staff in Lyon, who is the taxpayer: the CDN, the SaaS company that bought the CDN, or both, each adding its own surcharge on the way down to you? I don't know, and from the reporting so far nobody else does either, which is precisely when a supplier's finance team prices in the worst case.

The obvious reply is that all this is premature. The amendment passed on an 11 to 10 vote in a thinly attended session, it still has to get through the Senate, and the government has made its reservations known. I agree it may never take effect. That is my reason for asking now, while asking costs nothing. A vendor that has already decided to pass the tax on has a spreadsheet with your French traffic in it, and you should see it. A vendor that hasn't decided will say so, and you can write that answer into the contract. A clause about a tax that never arrives costs you a paragraph of legal drafting. A silent uplift justified by a tax that never arrives hands your supplier a permanent slice of your budget.

Procurement teams negotiating renewals this winter should add one sentence to every SaaS, cloud and CDN contract with meaningful French usage: any charge attributed to Article 302 bis ZR, or to any other per-volume data levy, appears as a separate invoice line, is calculated from the gigabytes actually delivered to your French users, and disappears from the next invoice if the tax does not take effect or is struck down. Then send the same sentence to the vendors whose contracts are not up for renewal, and keep a list of the ones that decline to sign it.

Prompted by 12 € pour GTA VI, 0,45 € pour un film : une taxe inédite sur les données adoptée à l'Assemblée, lesnumeriques.com.