Internet Law - Fall 2007

Taxation...

Of the three issues – taxation, harmful-to-minors material, and spam – I think taxation is the most appropriate area for national legislation. The internet is geographically limitless and clearly lacks physical boundaries – and clear physical boundaries are a touchstone of the tax structure in the US. The best way to handle this problem as it relates to e-commerce is to impose taxes using a uniform system, which would require national legislation. Spam is certainly annoying, but when “spam-filters” can most likely be enhanced through technological developments to block spam more effectively – the idea of national legislators spending time and money on the issue seems unproductive, if not completely wasteful. A similar argument can be made for harmful-to-minors material: just as parents can choose to block certain television channels from broadcasting in their homes to protect their children from what they feel is inappropriate programming, developing technology can help parents to decide what online materials to block their children from accessing on their home computers.

Troubling Spam

I feel that Spam Control requires national legislative control.  There are a few reasons for this which I will now point out.  Firstly, Spam mail by default affects people on a national level as it is sent throughout the 50 States and therefore needs a codified system of control which all states agree too .  Otherwise, as mentioned in class, it would be hard for mass mailers to follow the regulations of each individual state.  Second, the risk of potential damage that spam could cause due to malware being sent through mass mail is much larger than the the risks associataed with taxation or harmful material to minors.  As can be seen with the Storm worm, if mail isnt controlled it is easy to infect entire nations.  Lastly, E-mail has taken over as the most common means of business communication.  It is necessary for people to be able to easily discern what mail is important without having to sort through mounds of uneccesary mortgage loans/drug advertisements.
    While it is important to shield children from material deemed offensive, I think that that job is best suited to the parents rather than the government, as each family/parents finds different types of material offensive and its not the governments job to baby sit.  As far as taxation goes, I dont think this is really the forum for me to get into my thoughts on taxes.

My vote is for SPAM.

Out of the three options discussed in class, I feel that SPAM is the most in need of Federal Regulation. In order to protect the rights of all, it seems to be the most valid option to be regulated through a set national standard. It will also be the most effective way to not infringe on free speech rights of the individual by giving complete notice to the rules throughout the entire nation.

Personally, I think SPAM should be considered a form of harassment, not a regulated Internet practice. If someone came by to your house every day and dumped a truck-load of ads in front of your door, that would be considered harassment eventually and wouldn’t be tolerated. Why is it okay to have to face the daily onslaught of mailbox filling horror in the digital realm? No I don’t want to make it bigger, save money, or start a new career. If I do, I will find you.

Harmful to minor material is an extremely vague concept in which different communities may view differently. There are many things, which may be considered harmful to minors, and its regulation is best left up to the home. It is the guardian’s responsibility to filter minor’s exposure to what they personally deem as harmful. A school may have different filters in place then a household, and so on.

In the realm of taxation, I must admit I have never taken a tax class, whether in undergraduate studies or in law school. Regardless, every jurisdiction applies their taxation laws to their citizens. I don’t see the need for a Federal Taxation Standard on the Internet, just as there isn’t one for mail catalog purchases. You vote directly for your local counsel, and they are the best in deciding how the people who reside in their jurisdiction should be taxed for Internet purchases.

Taxes, because they are more important.

 

Between taxation, harmful-to-minors materials and spam, I would have to say that taxation requires national (as opposed to local) legislation more than the other two for several reasons. Taxes can be applied to nearly all transactions undertaken using e-commerce and so non-uniform taxation legislation would subject the majority of companies that engage in e-commerce to a near insurmountable burden in selling their products and services across state borders. To contrast, non-uniform legislation in harmful-to-minors materials or spam would, by definition, affect only a comparatively smaller number of online transactions, all of which would fall into the larger group of transactions to which taxes could be applied. For this reason, non-uniform legislation affecting harmful-to-minors and spam communications would burden only a subset of the transactions that would be unduly burdened by non-uniform tax law.  Harmful-to-minors materials and spam are also not universally protected, so burdening those communications with non-uniform legislation is better than burdening all interstate transactions that can take place using e-commerce, when it is pretty much universally agreed that e-commerce is of great worth to society and that government’s are allowed to tax commerce.

I wonder why they call it spam

Although having to decide whether anything regarding the internet should be regulated at all is a daunting question and raises many concerns, I think that all web geeks and late night internet surfers can agree on one thing: the destruction of spam.

We all know why spam is annoying...what we forget is that it can sometimes be dangerous for your computer. As a law student whose entire life and career future rests on the information stored on her hard drive, the idea of getting a suspicious email that could possibly contain a worm or virus that could endanger my hard work is the main reason I believe spam should be nationally regulated.

I do not think local legislation will be effective. A spammer could find a way to elude the law by engaging in "willful blindness" of local municipal or state statutes, and thereby will not be deterred from spamming. To clarify, imagine a situation where, much as in the Heckel case, the statute provides that a person cannot send commercial emails to people he "knows or reasonably should know" reside in a certain municipal or state area. The spammer could possibly find a way to make sure that he had no way to know what geographic location his emails were being sent. A national regulation on spamming, however, would result in no confusion regarding any statutes promulgated to restrict the use of unsolicited commercial email, and would apply and pre-empt any state law existing on the subject.

A Tax Quagmire

Obviously each of the three areas would benefit from national legislation.  The area that I think would most benefit and be most amenable to national legislation is the issue of taxation on the internet.  As noted in class, with the moratorium on internet taxation ending in November, we could be faced with complying with 7000 plus tax rules at the state and local level.  If the moratorium must come to an end, we would all benefit from a bit of certainty in this area.  At least we’d know whether we have to pay tax or not.  National internet taxation will likely also have a positive effect on the economy.  We may see a decline on internet consumerism and a return to the days of bricks and mortar shopping.

Further, like the rest of you, while I hate spam and condemn material that is harmful to minors, I believe that those will find their way into our homes and inboxes even in the face of national legislation.  So, choosing taxation was sort of a process of elimination for me, it seems the only one that will actually achieve something.  You can’t outlaw the material that is harmful to minors because it is not harmful to adults, and adults have a right to see it.  You may be able to restrict access but there is always a way around it for intrepid and determined minors. 

As for spam, I think national legislation in this area would be the hardest to enforce, akin to playing ‘whack-a-mole.’  And if a ‘do not spam’ list works as well as the ‘do not call’ list for telemarketers, I’ll be getting up from my family dinner table to go delete some spam. 

e-tax

The issue of taxing e-commerce is in greater need of national regulation than spam and harmful online-material.  Spam and harmful online-material are equally important issues, but can be regulated efficiently by state and local governments.

Uniform national regulation of tax on e-commerce is particularly important since Internet users have little if no ability to bypass any particular state or locality when purchasing items online.  At the same time, without uniform regulation, Internet companies may take advantage of the mobile nature of servers to ensure that their profits are taxed in states or localities with low tax jurisdiction.  National regulation can preempt state or local governments from enacting discriminatory and inconsistent tax laws on e-commerce. 

Another problem presented by inconsistent application of tax on e-commerce is that multi-state businesses may have to incur significant compliance costs, such as having to file tax returns and fulfill reporting obligations in every jurisdiction where their servers are located.  With over 7,500 taxing jurisdictions at the state and local level, this could become extremely burdensome.

Effective national regulation is particularly important in the area of tax on e-commerce as more and more commercial activity takes place over the Internet.  Inability to effectively tax Internet transactions can potentially lead to significant revenue loss for local, state, and federal governments, perhaps resulting in the inability to fund important public goods.

Assignment 2

I believe that Internet taxes need Federal regulation more than spam. I think that governmental efforts to prohibit access to material that is “harmful to minors” are neither effective nor Constitutional due to the 1^st Amendment issues they raise. That sort of thing should be left to the actual parents to decide what their own children can and cannot see online rather than shoving that burden off onto a nanny state. 

 

There could be federal regulations on spam but local ones would likely be more effective and pose less of a Constitutional issue on the commercial speech of the spammers. 

 

E-commerce goes beyond local commerce and into the realm of interstate commerce by the method of communication that is the internet. Internet stores that ship orders to multiple states go beyond the borders of their physical location and out that location’s government’s jurisdiction to collect taxes.   Congress has the explicit power to regulate interstate commerce and to create federal tax law.  There are no 1st Amendment issues.

No Spam for You!

I have literally been sitting here for 38 minutes thinking about this question and I don’t think that I have made any progress as I keep going around in circles! 

Out of these three, I’m going to go with Spam as the most deserving for National legislation.  I did not pick harmful-to-minors material because I feel that this is better-suited for local legislation.  I would not want other states telling me what is too harmful for my children.  This is a Parenting 101.  Restrict the sites that your child visits or better yet, talk to your children about the internet and the “dangers” that could occur. 

I did not pick taxation because I do not believe that the Internet should be taxed.  Or should that be the most deserving of national legislation? National legislation for “No Federal Taxation”? I think the local legislation for tax has been working great.  States already have different tax structures.  Why ruin a good thing? 

That leaves me with spam.  Without national legislation, all the spammers would flock to the least restricted state and continue spamming without any consequences.  With national legislation, comes more funding.  It would be much easier to fight the international spammer. 

Spamming is not a local issue, it is a national issue.  People can easily agree on what is spam and what is not spam, unlike harmful-to-minors material and taxation.  Spam is purposely sent to everyone on the Internet, not just the email addresses in that state.  National legislation is needed.

Assignment 2

Although courts apply three different tests when evaluating whether restrictions on commerce through the dorminant commerce clause, the decision ultimately rests on whether the benefits of the legislation to residents outweighs the burdens on commerce.  In the context of the internet, localized regulation creates many difficulties since many e-businesses have customers in many jurisdictions, and the laws in each jurisdiction may conflict.  Although taxation, harmful to minors material and spam all create issues of inconsistencies in how local laws treat them, and as a result, they would all benefit from national legislation.

Many online sites are not subject to sales tax if they do not have a physical component in an individual state.  As a result, many things sold over the internet do no get taxed.  If there was nationalized legislation on taxation, then all sales by companies with a physical component in the

US

would be taxed, adding to the overall country’s tax revenue, and benefiting the American people as a whole, while only burdening them to pay sales tax of a few percent a little more often when shopping on the internet.

Harmful to minors material is in less need of national legislation because all states in some way have legislation against spreading pornography or any harmful to minors materials.  As a result, no matter what state the materials were sent to, the sender would know that the material should not be sent to minors.  The inconsistencies of local legislation are therefore less of an issue in this situation.

Spam, as shown in the Heckle case, can also be resolved by local legislation as long as the legislation is phrased so not to conflict with other legislation.  This again shows that local legislation does not have to be inconsistent.  While Spam and harmful to minors materials can be controlled through local legislation, taxation has the greatest need for national legislation.