A browser game called Taxe-au-giga.fr invites players to apply France’s proposed per-gigabyte tax to the lawmaker behind it. Each click simulates a visit to Socialist deputy Laurent Lhardit’s website and the download of his “One Year in Office” newsletter, adding a calculated €0.00477 to his bill. At 86.7 megabytes per simulated visit, it takes 210 clicks to add about one euro.
Created by an X user identified as Lamine, the parody borrows the incremental gameplay of Cookie Clicker. Players earn bonuses such as a “hamster router” and a fictional bot farm, while a shared counter tallies the simulated charges. The site can also generate a PDF invoice addressed to Lhardit as the author of the amendment. At the time described in the source report, the combined fictional bill had reached €534 billion.
France’s National Assembly adopted Lhardit’s amendment to the 2027 finance bill by 11 votes to 10 on October 30. It would charge companies that send data to internet users in France 5.5 euro cents per gigabyte. The game’s satire also targets a vote by lawmaker Éric Coquerel, who supported the measure before saying he had pressed the wrong button. On the parody site, the “against” button dodges the cursor, while the “for” button stays put.
The joke draws attention to unresolved questions in the amendment. The site’s serious mode estimates that a deputy’s page might receive around 500 human visitors a day, or roughly 1,000 visits when bots are included. It notes that the text provides no exemptions for bots, security updates or associations, meaning data transfers could count regardless of whether a person requested them.
The amendment also leaves uncertainty over which party would be liable. It refers to identifying senders through an International Assigned Numbers Authority registration number, although IANA coordinates IP addresses and network numbers and does not register companies. Internet providers may instead see the network delivering the data, often a hosting company. OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba has estimated that his company could face an annual bill of €23 million to €70 million, including the cap.
That cap is set at 15% of revenue in France or 2% of global revenue. The text does not explicitly exempt associations. VideoLAN, the organization behind VLC, has said its potential bill could exceed €1 million a year and is seeking a formal exemption; Lhardit has argued that the cap would mean the tax would not apply to it.
A further vote on the budget’s revenue section, scheduled for November 3, was postponed while lawmakers worked through the remaining amendments. The Assembly has until midnight on November 17 to decide on the full budget at first reading. If it rejects the revenue section, the Senate would examine the government’s original version, without the proposed data tax.
Sources: Numerama.