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>Maybe instead of putting on a show in court, Netflix et al should simply stop asking people for their physical addresses? I mean, that is the underlying vulner

>Maybe instead of putting on a show in court, Netflix et al should simply stop asking people for their physical addresses? I mean, that is the underlying vulnerability that will allow this push to succeed. That's an interesting point. There are internet services that don't require an address to pay for something. What are their legal obligations, if any, with respect to local taxes? I assume quite a few local laws don't explicitly make this a loophole, so does that mean anyone doing business online has the legal obligation to collect address information? That would be an odd situation, and it doesn't seem to be the one we're in. It seems like the situation on the ground is that in reality only companies big enough to attract attention are at risk from this. My understanding of the legal situation is that the federal government in the United States provides the legal basis for ensuring that a business in one state or city abides by the laws of another state or city when it sells to its residents. But they seem uninterested in actually enforcing this. It's interesting to think about what would happen to companies of various sizes should they refuse to implement this tax. Small / medium size companies? Probably nothing. In fact it's unlikely that many of them will implement it. Suppose Netflix refuses; it now becomes illegal for Chicago residents to purchase Netflix subscriptions (unless they have some mechanism for the citizens to pay the taxes themselves, as some states do; this usually doesn't happen though). But Netflix can say "no problem", we just make web servers available over the Internet, we don't check whether someone's logging in from Chicago. What does Chicago do? They either ban the Netflix domain at the local internet level, or (more likely) they get the Federal government involved and have fines put in place to penalize Netflix for not paying taxes to Chicago. I'm not a lawyer though, and it would be interesting to get one's point of view of one here since questions about jurisdiction come up here all the time, e.g. whether US companies have to comply with EU laws.

mindslight 7y ago
Legally, government can keep grinding at the courts until they convince some judge to write a justification for the practice - look at what happened to the Bill of Rights. The legal system assumes its own omnipotence, rather than limiting its own scope and excusing itself. So those limits end up being defined by what is actually practical to enforce. Which is why the technical environment ends up being quite important, and the web 2.0 surveillance industry is ultimately the enemy of Free people - it is vaccination for the state [0]. If Chicago ended up failing here, we could chuckle at the corrupt politicians making nonsensical laws and then quickly forget. But rather, success means that other municipalities will be looking to get on this gravy train. Then, even if there is eventual pushback where online services start explicitly forgoing obtaining users' addresses, there will be enough money behind it to fund that grinding at the courts. Eventually it will be declared that doing business and not obtaining the identity of your customer is illegal, presuming an intent to evade all of these "duly enacted" backwoods laws. [0] FWIW Bitcoin is in the same class, as it negligently lacks the standard property of untraceability.

mindslight 7y ago

Legally, government can keep grinding at the courts until they convince some judge to write a justification for the practice - look at what happened to the Bill of Rights. The legal system assumes its own omnipotence, rather than limiting its own scope and excusing itself. So those limits end up being defined by what is actually practical to enforce. Which is why the technical environment ends up being quite important, and the web 2.0 surveillance industry is ultimately the enemy of Free people - it is vaccination for the state [0]. If Chicago ended up failing here, we could chuckle at the corrupt politicians making nonsensical laws and then quickly forget. But rather, success means that other municipalities will be looking to get on this gravy train. Then, even if there is eventual pushback where online services start explicitly forgoing obtaining users' addresses, there will be enough money behind it to fund that grinding at the courts. Eventually it will be declared that doing business and not obtaining the identity of your customer is illegal, presuming an intent to evade all of these "duly enacted" backwoods laws. [0] FWIW Bitcoin is in the same class, as it negligently lacks the standard property of untraceability.