[Hawkee]

I'm surprised this article made no mention of the affiliate nexus laws that have been passed over the past few years. The law was first passed in New York requiring Amazon to collect sales tax from NY customers. NY claimed Amazon's NY "associates", affiliates earning commissions for sending customers to Amazon, represented a physical nexus. Amazon agreed to collect the tax in this case, but it opted not to collect tax in other states who enacted a similar law. Instead Amazon effectively "fired" all of the affiliates living in those states. In one case Fat Wallet, a major player in the online affiliate industry, moved their company out of Illinois because they lost many of their affiliate partners. Illinois didn't gain anything and lost a source of income tax. This has been a major issue in the affiliate industry as it cuts off huge sources of revenue for affected affiliates. Amazon is pushing for the federal government to step in partly because they don't want to lose their online marketers. Secondly, they don't want to maintain a database of tens of thousands of tax jurisdictions across the country.

[jessaustin]

maintain a database of tens of thousands of tax jurisdictions across the country.

This was always a red herring. Vertex (and presumably others, although I've only worked with Vertex) already maintains this database, and will help any company calculate taxes for a reasonable fee. Corporations with far lower revenues than Amazon have been taxing in many jurisdictions for decades.