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

Tue Jul 5 12:09:49 EDT 2011


On Tuesday 05 July 2011 08:20 PM, Lee W McKnight wrote:
> 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.

Not necessarily the wrong thing to do. If this means illegitimate 
economic flows from South to North and Southern public authorities being 
starved of legitimate tax receipts, this  has direct and strong public 
interest implications, including of welfare expenditure, and thus it is 
an important civil society issue. parminder
> 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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