Late last week the House reintroduced legislation to permanently ban taxing internet access, with the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act.
Temporary bans on such a tax have been renewed since 1998. The ban was most recently renewed in the Cromnibus, but will expire in October.
The move is strategically tied to killing attempts in the Senate to impose taxes on online purchases at websites like Amazon, the National Journal reports. The Senate would likely have wrapped legislation to tax online sales in a deal that simultaneously extended the ban on internet access taxes.
“Whether business owners or jobseekers, grandparents or students, all Americans benefit from tax-free access to the Internet,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va, said of the bill Friday. “Year after year, Congress has chosen to temporarily extend the bipartisan ban on Internet access taxes. The time has come to make this ban permanent.”
A permanent ban would also end internet access taxes in the several states that have exceptions to the temporary ban: Hawaii, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin.
In the Senate, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), members of the Commerce and Finance commitees, have both expressed support for a permanent ban on taxing internet access.
“I am very hopeful that next year, a permanent — a permanent — version of the Internet Tax Freedom Act will be enacted,” Wyden said last month. “Sen. Thune and I are going to continue to work together on a bipartisan basis until that is done.”
Thune argued that allowing a tax on internet access would “risk canceling out our other efforts to get more Americans online.”
