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Well friends, the election of 2000 is finally
over. Now we at the Association of Concerned Taxpayers (AOCTP)
look forward to the coming 107th Congress. This Congress will be
dealing with a wide array of high-tech issues which have in large part
been ignored by the members.
One of the biggest eIssues with respects to the Internet will be the
moratorium on Special taxes. The current moratorium will be
expiring at the end of the year. Congress will have to decide to
either extend the moratorium or to let it expire and open the Net up
for a slew of new taxes. The right decision would be to make the
moratorium permanent. In the 106th Congress, AOCTP supported
Rep. Chris Cox’s (R-CA) bill extending the moratorium for five
years, and Senator Bob Smith’s (R-NH) similar moratorium extension
bill. Although the Cox bill did pass the House in May 2000,
Smith ’s bill was bottled up in committee.
A second big eIssue for the new Congress will be Intellectual property
rights with respect to the Internet. The members will have to
devise a way to tackle this issue without any sort of a template
because this is uncharted water for the Congress, as are most of the
Tech Issues. Most members of Congress don’t have a clue to
what the Net is. There are many members who refuse to turn their
computer on or check email. Two, they are not well informed on
the topic of intellectual property. They don’t have any idea
what Napster is or Gnutella, why Hollywood is leading an all-out
assault on companies like them.
A third big eIssue is the idea of an Internet Sales tax. This
issue doesn’t have to be as complicated but members of Congress are
known for complicating simple Issues and over-simplifying complicated
issues. Politicians are very eager to levy some sort of a
national sales eTax. Many of these eTaxers are trumpeting the
Digital Divide and saying that a tax from eCommerce would be used to
close the divide. Another cause is leveling the playing field
for mom and pop stores. Congress wants to level the field for
mom and pop by stifling the eCommerce industry, as opposed to teaching
mom and pop how to go online and take part in the new economy.
An easy and simple solution is to apply the current rules for catalog
sales to the internet for taxation. If you have a physical
presence in the state where you are selling, you must collect sales
tax otherwise no tax.
The fourth eIssue facing Congress will be the Digital Divide.
This is a myth perpetuated by many tax and spenders. They seem
to believe that a large segment of the population is being left off
the Net. They seem to think the only way to get these people
online is by the government taxing those who are online to help these
folks get online so that they can to pay a tax on the Net too.
What Congress fails to understand is that there are corporations like
Microsoft setting up Internet labs in low income neighborhoods like
housing projects in Washington, DC. This is the same Microsoft
that the Janet Reno’s Department of Justice has been after for the
past eight years.
The fifth and possibly the single most important eIssue will be Cyber
Privacy. The FBI earlier this year unveiled its Carnivore spying
software. Carnivore allows the feds to see what you are doing online.
If you think that sounds like Big Brother, that’s just what it is.
The FBI claims that Carnivore is just like a tap on phone lines, but
unlike phone taps, which the need a court order to do, they don’t
need any such order for Carnivore. Another Cyber Privacy issues is
whether or not online retailers have the right to sell the
information they collect when you shop online without your consent.
In the coming months the Association of Concerned Taxpayers will be
releasing a list of tech bills that are on the table and monitoring
their progress as the 107th Congress gets settled in. We will be
watching on how these members tackle these issues, which will
determine the future of the Internet.
Dwight Patel serves on the Board of the Association
of Concerned Taxpayers.
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© Dwight Patel, 2000
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