The Senate hopes to relaunch the talk on a tax towards Internet giants to finance digital infrastructure | EUROtoday

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The President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, and the Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, during the 107th anniversary of the Armistice of 1918, in Paris, November 11, 2025.

The measure intends to place an outdated debate again on the desk. As a part of the examination of the finance invoice for 2026, senators adopted, on Saturday November 29, an modification aimed toward making the Internet giants pay for his or her use of digital infrastructures. This “exceptional contribution”, specifies the textual content, immediately targets the Americans Netflix, Akamai, Google, Meta and Amazon, arguing that they are going to generate nearly half of Internet site visitors in 2024, in keeping with the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications and Postal Services.

But this “massive traffic”deplores the modification, forces telecom operators to speed up their investments of their networks. This is why he proposes to tax the Internet giants at 1% of their turnover in France. This ” contribution “of which we nonetheless have no idea how a lot it might usher in, could be “assigned to the financing, modernization and resilience of digital networks and infrastructures”, the textual content continues.

For years, telecom operators have been lobbying intensely in Brussels for the Internet giants to partially finance the set up of fiber or 5G. A brand new European regulation on digital networks should additionally carry the veil, by the tip of the 12 months, on such a system. The Senate, which represents native authorities, is now delicate to this concept, in a context the place a number of fastened Internet networks deployed within the countryside, on the initiative of native authorities, are reporting financial difficulties.

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https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2025/12/02/le-senat-espere-relancer-le-debat-sur-une-taxe-contre-les-geants-du-net-pour-financer-les-infrastructures-numeriques_6655754_3234.html