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Senate Passes Bill Making Internet Tax Ban Permanent (consumerist.com)
kheldan writes: Nearly two decades ago, Congress passed the first Internet Tax Freedom Act, establishing that — with a handful of grandfathered exceptions — local, state, and federal governments couldn't impose taxes on Internet access. Problem is, that law has had to be renewed over and over, each time with an expiration date. But today, the U.S. Senate finally passed a piece of legislation that would make the tax ban permanent.
No Congress can pass a law that a subsequent Congress can't repeal. There is no such thing as "permanent."
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Various government agencies do collect tax on purchases made using the internet. This is just no tax on the connectivity provided by an ISP.
The senate is controlled by Republicans, too
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Tax on the connection, not goods purchased using it.
If you let them tax the connection you'd quickly get states and cities imposing either per user taxes or a per meg tax based on 1995 average webpage size and traffic statistics.
If the ban had lapsed, you can bet the first words out of my city mayor's mouth would have been "email postage".
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Forgive me if this is a stupid question. Lots of jurisdictions impose taxes on cell phone service. Where I live right now does so. I have LTE, in which everything (voice, texts, data) is sent as data. Essentially it's purely an internet connection. If Congress makes it illegal for anyone to tax internet access, wouldn't this also cover wireless services? For previous generations of wireless technology, it could be argued that the portions not sent as data were what was being taxed. That doesn't seem to be the case for LTE where it's all data. Unless there's some specific exemption for wireless services that I'm not aware of, shouldn't this mean that my city imposing a tax for cell phone services on me is illegal under federal law?
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Why not tax the internet? I can see not taxing it when it was a fledging system
The internet connectivity is sometimes taxed through telecommunications taxes, particularly federal ones.
The ban is on state/city taxation of network access.
It prohibits things such as providers having to pay a "Franchise tax" for every city, discriminatory taxes, E.g. "LAN Tax per Port", "bit tax", "bandwidth tax", "Tax per E-mail message", "$0.05 per Instant message, Tweet, or Facebook update"
The Tax Freedom act does not prohibit things such as Sales Tax on real or digital goods, and taxing the providers' profits.... Internet-based transactions are still subject to tax; it's the internet connectivity itself that is protected.