Cloud Taxes Already Prevalent

Monday, August 24, 2015

States may or may not succeed in levying sales taxes on Internet vendors located outside their borders, but that doesn't mean they haven't been successfully looting other areas of the electronic frontier. According to Fortune, cloud services, such as Netflix, are increasingly being taxed.

In July, Chicago enacted a "Cloud tax" which placed a levy on Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services. Netflix says that its services are now taxable "in roughly half of U.S. states and certain municipalities," according to the WSJ. [bold added]
I'd seen the earlier story linked in the excerpt, but it didn't mention the fact that so many states were already taxing (or ready to tax) Netflix. The above link also details the latest effort to revive the so-called "Marketplace Fairness Act" in Congress, discussed in the first link.

-- CAV

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

HI Gus,

Apparently our 'friends' down under have a more 'global' perspective on this 'problem'.

http://pc.blogspot.com/2015/08/lets-just-ban-online-purchases-outright.html


I guess for all statists, freedom is a problem to be 'solved', in both its free minds and free markets manifestations.

c. andrew

Gus Van Horn said...

C.,

Yes, I spotted that some time after I checked the auto-post this morning. Notice that, in each story, the large companies immediately rolled over.

Gus

Dave Wright said...

eMainStreet offered some of my favorite videos that oppose the Marketplace Fairness Act and any other poorly envisioned internet tax. I can't for the life of me understand why Congress insists on undermining free markets. The cynical part of me says that power prefers more power, in spite of progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMEKXl0hNwo&list=PLt5zAu2L3A-oY-pUmAmE2LoU-KxJuSILm&index=1

Gus Van Horn said...

Dave,

Thanks for leaving the link to the video. I look forward to viewing it a bit later.

Gus

Dave Wright said...

I hope you find it informative. I liked it a lot. The series has 6, 2-min videos or so. I've been pretty concerned about this issue of late. (cloud taxes, efairness, internet access tax, etc.)

Gus Van Horn said...

Dave,

Thanks for the durations. Working in videos and podcasts can be tricky for me.

Gus