It will keep you up to date on important industry developments, policy issues, and other pertinent communications-related news events. Legislation to ban new taxes targeting the Internet for five years is stalled in the Senate, where some members are demanding that Congress address a perceived inequity between the treatment of online and offline commerce. Sen. Wyden's legislation is an attempt to break the deadlock. It calls for an up or down vote in five years on giving states and localities new tax-collection powers, after they simplify their tax systems.
States currently lack the legal power to collect sales taxes on interstate Internet transactions.
His proposal would allow for sales tax collections to begin automatically in a few years, after states move to simplify their tax systems, unless Congress votes to object. The programmer, Ian Clarke of Ireland, hopes to produce a world in which all information is freely shared. His work is set for a collision course with the world's copyright laws. Mr Clarke and many other programmers think that copyright protection is simply obsolete in the Internet Age. Check out the debate at the URL below.