Bad news for online shoppers (like me): US Supreme court says states can charge sales tax …

Tags

internet

This is bad news …

In a five-to-four decision issued today, the Supreme Court ruled that states can make online businesses collect sales taxes — even if they don’t have a physical presence in that state.

Today’s ruling overturns a decision from the Court in 1992 that paved the way for the explosion of online retail in the United States.

At issue was the Quill Corp. v. North Dakota decision, which ruled that companies need to have at least some physical connection with a state for that state to require that company to pay taxes.

Today’s ruling caused publicly traded e-commerce company share prices to tumble, with Shopify, Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Alibaba all recording losses in midday trading on their respective U.S. exchanges.

link: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/states-will-be-able-to-charge-sales-tax-on-online-purchases-thanks-to-the-supreme-court/

75 Year Old Woman Cuts Off Web Access To Whole of Country of Armenia

Tags

internet

Georgian woman cuts off web access to whole of Armenia | World news | The Guardian.

Opps, I hope she said she was sorry.

Internet dies in Egypt – Yahoo! News

Tags

AK-47, Egypt, internet, liberty, RKBA

Update 1/30/2011:  Found an interesting video  http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110128-agenda-george-friedman-egypt Dr. George Friedman thinks it’s most likely that the Egyptian military will decide what happens. A reformist, democratic regime is the least likely outcome.

SAN FRANCISCO – About a half-hour past midnight Friday morning in Egypt, the Internet went dead.

Almost simultaneously, the handful of companies that pipe the Internet into and out of Egypt went dark as protesters were gearing up for a fresh round of demonstrations calling for the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule, experts said.

Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: It unplugged itself entirely from the Internet to try and silence dissent.

The day part of the Internet died: Egypt goes dark – Yahoo! News.

To me, if the government shuts off the internet it’s AK-47 time. Note this happened in a totalitarian state where people’s natural right to self defense and RKBA is denied to them.

Help Save the Internet

Tags

internet, net neutrality

This is a campaign to preserve net neutrality, which is opposed by AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner et al. They want to determine which sites get better, worse, or no throughput. Keep the internet open and free!