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Amazon Prevails In State Sales Tax Dispute, Thus Far
snsh writes "A US judge has ruled for Amazon.com (PDF) against North Carolina's request to turn over the names of its customers to state tax officials. The ruling was focused on privacy grounds, so the state can still re-request less detailed sales data which does not identify items purchased."
Reader arbitraryaardvark adds a link to The Volokh Conspiracy's take on the decision.
There's a difference between seeking to avoid paying their taxes (finding shelters, etc. like Google), and refusing to help the state violate the interstate commerce clause (like Amazon is doing here).
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
I think I speak for all foreigners when I say that America is already very taxing.
Why should convicted felons lose the right to vote? What really is the point? Once the sentence is served, the convict should be considered a free man again, with the same rights and responsibilities. If that is deemed inappropriate, he should still be in prison. Why have second class citizenship?
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
like transferring goods.
Conducting business transactions and transferring goods to someone out of state is called interstate commerce. And the supreme law of the land says that the power to regulate interstate commerce belongs exclusively to the US congress, and specifically indicates that states do not have the power to lay tarrifs, duties, imposts, or otherwise tax imports.
In other words.. no... the foreign state doesn't have authority or power to regulate you transferring goods into their state; that authority has been explicitly reserved for the feds.
Absolutely.
I host an online store for a friend - she used to set up booths at conventions and such but due to health reasons, she is now completely online. (used to do mail order too as it was a niche product, but nobody does mail order anymore). She's having enough trouble just complying with PCI standards. She freaked out when she first saw the questionnaires and I had to spend quite a bit of time going through it and explaining what was meant and spent a lot of time tweaking server and application to meet the PCI standard (it asks for mostly common sense stuff, but is worded with some absolutes that mean that a technically secure compensating measure doesn't qualify you to answer YES/NO to a given question, but I digress)
The point is that she's a friend and I essentially put in quite a few billable hours pro-bono. However, PCI compliance was a walk in the park compared to what we'd have to do should she be required to deal with all those tax jurisdictions you mentioned. She would not be able to afford it with her sales and I'm at my limit (even with a friend) for how much time I'm willing/able to give away.
I custom wrote her shopping cart and checkout system, and before anyone says it, at the time I wrote it, there was NOTHING available on the market that met her needs and she could afford.
YES we could probably rebuild her site using something commercial or FOSS today, but she still can't afford what it would cost to do the conversion. In my opinion, such a complex mess of tax jurisdictions would force mom and pop type places offline or force them to pay big vendors for their carts/checkouts.
That might not seem like the end of the world, but it feels like yet another barrier to entry... over time, the more regulatory and statutory hurdles businesses and individuals have to negotiate in order to go online will destroy a lot of the freedom and openness that made the Internet so fertile a place for speech and innovation in the first place.
The Digital Sorceress