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

Lee W McKnight lmcknigh at syr.edu
Tue Jul 5 10:50:02 EDT 2011 

Not to give any lurking tax collectors heart palpitations, but with the growth of cloud services, this Taiwan case is just the tip of a virtual iceberg.

But....us cs types coming out talking about global taxation authority/agreements is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Better to frame in terms of seeking to defend legit local authorities against notorious cheats like Amazon starving the schoolkids of California, or Taiwan, as Google apparently is learning and now exploiting the same tricks.

Lee
________________________________________
From: michael gurstein [gurstein at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 10:36 AM
To: Lee W McKnight; 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

What is interesting here of course, is that Google was able technically to
shut down the service within the area of municipal jurisdiction.  Since
there seems to be no means for Taipei to similarly shut down Google's app
service (or is there?), the problem here as with Amazon is an assymetry in
the nature of the technology (and thus the power/influence that the
technology provides--centralized control over local distribution).

All of this strongly suggests again the need for some sort of global
regulation to re-establish some sort of more symmetrical distribution of
power otherwise governments great and small are going to have very severe
problems and sooner rather than later.

M

-----Original Message-----
From: Lee W McKnight [mailto:lmcknigh at syr.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 6:42 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; michael gurstein; 'Roland Perry'
Subject: RE: [governance] FW: TP: city government exercising policy on
Google Applications / consumer rights / Consumer Protection Act / trial
period


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 ____________________________________________________________
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