08
May
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Ir’a been said of Democrats that they never met a tax they didn’t love, and never has that been more true than in New York.
Even though Congress has declared the Internet to be tax free nationwide, except in states where the seller and sellee both reside, New York has now proclaimed a legal loophole, citing what its tax department says is U.S. Supreme Court precedent regarding sales by "representatives" within state borders. In other words, if you manufacture widgets in Tennessee, but a representative of yours working in New York sells a widget in New York, it’s taxable in that state.
Now, by a cyberspacian stretch of money hunger, the New York Department of Tax and Finance has ruled that affiliate sites owned, operated or located server-wise by people residing in New York can be taxed for their transactions. If, for instance, you have a personal blog in the Empire State and you put up an Amazon banner and sell a book or two, Amazon must collect tax and send it to New York even though Amazon is not located there.
How they plan to track all these transactions is beyond me, but the sheer audacity of this sends chills down my spine.
Here’s an article explaining what’s going on.
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05
May
This is all news to me, and I’m still piecing it all together, but here’s the latest battle going on.
Bill Gates, who yesterday bailed on buying Yahoo, envisions the Internet controlling television. I assume this means that you pick your programs and line them up through an Internet portal while then viewing your chosen content on TV. Presumably, the advertising would be Internet-controlled. Otherwise, other than making the Interface, what’s it in for Microsoft?
However, just today a Boston-based company called Backchannelmedia has started to turn the tables on old man Gates by introducing set-top boxes that allow TV viewers to click through anything they see on TV to gain further detail on the Internet. This allows the cable companies using Backchannelmedia’s set-top device not only to track and record each viewer’s habits, but also to use a shopping interface. When viewers decide to purchase something based either on clicking through a television advertisement or finding the product or service to purchase after clicking through on TV content, the cable provider controls the shopping cart–and the profits.
It all gets a bit complicated to understand, so I’d love to see this in practice.
It also gets more interesting. The arrangement also enables advertisers and media buyers to know which ads work for which viewers, and also which ads work on which programs, and thus target their advertising (and ad dollars) better. I’m not sure if this means that once a viewer has a certain "profile" that he or she will then see personalized advertisements while watching television.
Bottom line is that Backchannelmedia wants TV to control the Internet, and Bill Gates envisions just the opposite.
Here’s the most lucid article I could find on Backchannelmedia, but I’ll keep looking into this.
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04
May
Frankly, the world doesn’t need another Google or OPEC, so I was happy to see Bill Gates fail to gobble up Yahoo, one of the icons of the Internet.
If Microsoft took over Yahoo, would we suddenly see circling blue dots whenever we tried to do anything, as we do when we try to do simple tasks with Windows Vista? Or how about "continue" or "allow" alerts when we try to do a simple search?
Yuk.
Maybe Apple should step in.
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How’s he going to prove you can build a profitable business in such a short time?
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Apr
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