High treason, I’m afraid. You’ll swing for that.

I don’t understand. So, if VLC was downloaded from Tucows or GitHub…who pays? Surely not VLC, because as I read it, this taxes “producers of digital data” but the measurement mechanism is ISPs counting bytes by sender IP.

So if a French user downloads VLC from Tucows, Sourceforge, or Akamai’s CDN, the bytes come from Tucows/Akamai’s IP, not VideoLAN’s. Under a strict sender-IP reading, Tucows pays, not VideoLAN.

Wat?

If in some crazy world this actually goes ahead as written, one of two things happen

1. Everyone on earth geoblocks French IPs
2. Everyone dumps everything onto mirrors and washes their hands of it.