Today, California forced Amazon to terminate its advertising relationship with me. Today, I lost 26% of my advertising revenue. Amazon will not suffer as a result; California will not benefit either.
Unfortunately, we've known this was coming for several weeks; it was included in the budget partly to placate local booksellers and big-box retailers (Wal-Mart, etc.), but primarily to falsely claim $195 million in additional revenue (as part of about $4 billion in "smoke and mirrors" revenue claims).
Of course, everyone knows that won't happen: as expected, Amazon terminated its advertising relationships with California web publishers today, so the $100 million of sales taxes that the state "expected" from Amazon is gone. The remaining "expected" revenue will follow, as Overstock and a hundred other out-of-state merchants terminate Californians from their affiliate programs.
It's wrong that Amazon and other out-of-state retailers don't collect sales tax in all states with sales taxes. But this law doesn't address that problem at all.
This topic has been widely discussed on ABestWeb.com over the past three years as similar laws were enacted in New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Illinois, and other states. Except for New York, none of these states have collected additional sales taxes from the laws.
Unfortunately, we've known this was coming for several weeks; it was included in the budget partly to placate local booksellers and big-box retailers (Wal-Mart, etc.), but primarily to falsely claim $195 million in additional revenue (as part of about $4 billion in "smoke and mirrors" revenue claims).
Of course, everyone knows that won't happen: as expected, Amazon terminated its advertising relationships with California web publishers today, so the $100 million of sales taxes that the state "expected" from Amazon is gone. The remaining "expected" revenue will follow, as Overstock and a hundred other out-of-state merchants terminate Californians from their affiliate programs.
It's wrong that Amazon and other out-of-state retailers don't collect sales tax in all states with sales taxes. But this law doesn't address that problem at all.
This topic has been widely discussed on ABestWeb.com over the past three years as similar laws were enacted in New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Illinois, and other states. Except for New York, none of these states have collected additional sales taxes from the laws.
My blog post today: http://blog.lessonindex.com/2011/06/california-forced-amazon...