[governance] FW: TP: city government exercising policy on Google Applications / consumer rights / Consumer Protection Act / trial period

[Lee W McKnight]

Michael,

Right it is all about jurisdiction.

Specifically, this is a legal 'nexus' question, ie where exactly does an activity take place, where a company's servers are located, where it has employees, and/or where it processes sales?

Legal treatment of these questions does indeed carry on from past court decisions and agreements on catalog sales. dating back 100 years or more.

Amazon.com is the most notorious Internet tax scofflaw, pretending that it never needs to collect local taxes - because it can;t figure out who/where it's customers are. And yet somehow they manage to process our transctions with them, while otherwise being mystified by the complexity of the net.

Right now they are bickering with the state of California over the interpretation of 'nexus,' as California passed a law just to get at them finally. 

But Bezos and Amazon have been fighting with various national and local governments over this issue since the company was founded, it is a core part of their low cost strategy to avoid collecting taxes, leaving the burden on the consumer to separately pay the 50 cents or whatever of taxes on purchased items.  

Anyway, in terms of Internet Governance, defining the the legal nexus of a globally distributed activity, and hence the locale to which one should be paying taxes, has been part of US-bilateral ecommerce and trade negotiations for more than a decade.  Haven't been paying as much attention to WTO's actions on this, if any.

Taxation, while not something we on the list talk about, much.

But of course taxation with and without representation is always a governance issue, and hence perfectly legitimate issue for us....if only we had more tax lawyers on the list ; ).

Lee


________________________________________
From: governance at lists.cpsr.org [governance at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of michael gurstein [gurstein at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 7:03 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; 'Roland Perry'
Subject: RE: [governance] FW: TP: city government exercising policy on Google Applications / consumer rights / Consumer Protection Act / trial period

On reflection I think that the rather more interesting issue is
jurisdiction.  Do municipal statutes have jurisdiction over non-local global
corporations with only a virtual presence/assets locally i.e. can a
municipal tax apply to virtually supplied electronic apps for example?

The activity pointed to in Taipei (and even Roland's commentary below) seem
to suggest that it does.  If that is the case then these are interesting
times indeed.

M

-----Original Message-----
From: governance at lists.cpsr.org [mailto:governance at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf
Of Roland Perry
Sent: Monday, July 04, 2011 10:59 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] FW: TP: city government exercising policy on
Google Applications / consumer rights / Consumer Protection Act / trial
period


In message <C125572E9A214CB591DFCFC6288D30F7 at userPC>, at 15:18:20 on
Mon, 4 Jul 2011, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> writes
>I'm not sure if there is a direct IG issue here (?) but this will
>potentially influence the overall policy/regulatory environment and
>attitudes toward international governance regimes I would have thought.
>
>If Internet delivered context of this kind is subject to domestic
>(municipal?) consumer protection laws then what about for example,
>Canada's laws concerning the requirement for bilingual packaging and so
>on?

There has been a "Distance Selling" law in Europe for some time, which
says that most items bought by mail order, over the telephone and
Internet etc, must be refundable within seven days if the consumer
doesn't like the goods when they arrive.

Rather than being a piece of "Internet Governance", I think this ought
to be looked upon as a classic case where ordinary law (designed for
mail order catalogues and TV shopping channels) also applies to business
conducted on the Internet.
--
Roland Perry ____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t

____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t

____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t