State Sales & Use Tax on Internet Transactions

The explosive growth of electronic commerce raises serious questions about the viability of the current state sales and use tax system. Sales via the Internet and other electronic means are changing both the form and substance of consumer transactions, and such sales often do not satisfy the traditional nexus requirement for state taxation because on-line vendors frequently lack physical presence in the purchaser’s home state. The inability to collect taxes on this growing segment of the retail sales market will impair states’ efforts to raise revenues and cause economically similar transactions to be treated differently. Consequently, Congress must act pursuant to its Commerce Clause authority to allow state taxation of interstate transactions by means of either federal legislation or uniform state laws. This will result in a system that taxes similar transactions in the same manner, regardless of the context of the transaction or the identity of the seller or service provider

Foreign (Non-US) Taxes On Internet Transactions

In most discussions of Internet taxation in the United States focus is on sales and use taxation of e-commerce. While such taxes are an important component of the taxing regime on e-commerce, it would be myopic to consider only US taxes as the only tax on Internet transactions. This paper discusses the most important foreign tax on e-commerce is the Value Added Tax (VAT), since a large number of foreign countries impose the VAT

A Broader View of Perceived Risk during Internet Transactions

Ubiquitous networking facilitates Internet access across multiple network environments, whose value is tied directly to user perceptions of its ability to securely execute transactions. Prior research has cited awareness, trust, and risk as critical determinants of adoption but has failed to examine these factors as they relate to infrastructure and its provider. Because information in transit is at risk from a network environment’s vulnerabilities, we focus on the implications of such risk on Internet activities. We examine the multiple parties that must be trusted to complete and facilitate an online transaction. We propose that the user must trust not only the information recipient to act benevolently but also the technologies and organizations that facilitate the online exchange

State Sales Taxation of Internet Transactions

This report examines state taxation of Internet transactions as well as efforts to achieve uniform state sales and use tax treatment

Development and Testing of a New Transport Protocol Optimized for Multimedia Internet Transactions.

The TCP/IP protocol, which carries over 95% of data across the Internet, was first published in 1974 at a time when packet-switching was a new technology and computer communications were dominated by the virtual-circuit paradigm. Computer networking has changed dramatically in the past quarter-century, but the underpinnings of TCP have remained virtually unchanged. Many of TCP's most significant design assumptions are no longer valid in the modern Internet. As a result, TCP typically exhibits extremely poor performance including congestion, underutilization of bandwidth, and server overload. Despite these facts, and increasing evidence that TCP/IP is not suited to many of the application protocols it supports, only incremental improvements have been widely researched and no viable alternatives have come to prominence. This dissertation proposes a new transport protocol, the Multimedia Transaction Protocol (MTP), which has been created to meet the needs of modern applications operating in a modern network environment. This new protocol has been designed to handle transaction style client-server interactions across an unreliable, highly congested, packet-switched network. Experimental and simulation results show that MTP provides an order of magnitude improvement in throughput while contributing to network stability and greatly reducing latency. This work characterizes the modern transport environment, describes the design and implementation of MTP, and presents initial test results

Standard-Form Contracting in the Electronic Age

The development of the Internet as a medium for consumer transactions creates a new question for contract law. In this Article, Professors Robert Hillman and Jeffrey Rachlinski address whether the risks imposed on consumers by Internet boilerplate requires a new lens through which courts should view these types of contracts. Their analysis of boilerplate in paper and Internet contracts examines the social, cognitive, and rational factors that affect consumers\u27 comprehension of boilerplate and compares business strategies in presenting it. The authors conclude that the influence of these factors in Internet transactions is similar to that in proper transactions. Although the Internet may in fact allow companies a greater opportunity to exploit consumers, Professors Hillman and Rachlinski argue that this phenomenon does not implicate a need to create a new framework for deciding cases involving Internet transactions. The Authors conclude that Professor Karl Llwewllyn\u27s theory of blanket assent, coupled with the unconscionability and reasonable-expectations doctrines that form the traditional framework, used by courts to determine the validity of boilerplate terms in the paper world, should apply equally to the Internet world. Recognizing some of the specific concerns that arise in respect to boilerplate in Internet contracts, however, they address a number of issues to which courts should apply particular scrutiny and that may require the adoption of new approaches in the future

Standard-Form Contracting in the Electronic Age

The development of the Internet as a medium for consumer transactions creates a new question for contract law. In this Article, Professors Robert Hillman and Jeffrey Rachlinski address whether the risks imposed on consumers by Internet boilerplate requires a new lens through which courts should view these types of contracts. Their analysis of boilerplate in paper and Internet contracts examines the social, cognitive, and rational factors that affect consumers\u27 comprehension of boilerplate and compares business strategies in presenting it. The authors conclude that the influence of these factors in Internet transactions is similar to that in proper transactions. Although the Internet may in fact allow companies a greater opportunity to exploit consumers, Professors Hillman and Rachlinski argue that this phenomenon does not implicate a need to create a new framework for deciding cases involving Internet transactions. The Authors conclude that Professor Karl Llwewllyn\u27s theory of blanket assent, coupled with the unconscionability and reasonable-expectations doctrines that form the traditional framework, used by courts to determine the validity of boilerplate terms in the paper world, should apply equally to the Internet world. Recognizing some of the specific concerns that arise in respect to boilerplate in Internet contracts, however, they address a number of issues to which courts should apply particular scrutiny and that may require the adoption of new approaches in the future