As Internet retail establishes itself as a new source of revenue for many businesses, governments are positioning themselves to make sure they don't lose out. When people buy products across state lines, they're supposed to pay sales tax to the state in which they live.
Nobody does it.
The state doesn't press it, because there's no way to control that. And it didn't matter so much in the past because the loss is minimal in a traditional economy. But Internet retail drops all barriers to people buying products across state lines. His basic idea is to make it easy and cheap for small businesses to collect Internet taxes. That way the companies don't have to buy the software themselves.