Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
And it's a politically fraught issue over here, as a lot of folks consider the fact that they don't get charged taxes on Internet sales to be one of the big reasons to buy over the Internet. But states and municipalities that garner significant revenue from such taxes want their cut of the take, and are increasingly pushing to get it. I've seen folks doing things like purchasing using a proxy server, so their apparent IP address isn't their actual one. "Geo-location" software maps your IP address to a geographic location, and is what the retailer will use to determine if it's supposed to charge you tax.
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Ouch, I can see that it would get very tangled very quickly. So, even within the US, you get charged sales tax according to where the
buyer is located, not the vendor? (I'm not implying any criticism, just trying to be clear about it.) I would have guessed it would be based on the vendor, because that's where the business is being transacted, but I s'pose the other way makes sense, because otherwise the higher-taxing states would find it hard to get businesses to set up there, wouldn't they?
(I know -- or think I do! -- from my reading that the independent sovereignty of the various states has been retained more strongly in the US than most other countries that have been separate states (like my own country, for instance) that then confederated. So I know it's one thing to do a transaction within the same state, but a lot of rules change once it involves crossing one or more state lines.)