On the contrary, as the Net grows, political disputes regarding technology's future will only increase. The deep divisions that kept the committee from reaching consensus didn't follow ideological or party lines. Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, a Republican, has led the opposition to Virginia Gov. James Gilmore, also a Republican, who has led the drive to ban taxes on e-commerce. It's possible to view this issue in ideological terms. The exemption of Internet sales from taxation is an extremely regressive tax policy.
Poor people spend less money online.
By exempting online purchases, the tax burden is disproportionately placed on the people who can least afford it, instead of on relatively wealthy Internet users. But that argument is rarely, if ever, invoked. Striking even closer to the concerns of public officials of all stripes, the exemption of Internet sales from taxation is a potential threat to states and localities that rely on sales taxes to finance their programs. That is a concern naturally uniting the most partisan of Democrats and Republicans. What is striking at the moment when it comes to privacy is that the big, bad government wolf is not a Joseph McCarthy-like reactionary or even a religious prude in the image of Pat Robertson, but more like Bill Clinton.