abstract:The 1998 Internet Tax Freedom Act was a United States law authored by Representative Christopher Cox and Senator Ron Wyden, and signed into law on October 21, 1998 by President Bill Clinton in an effort to promote and preserve the commercial, educational, and informational potential of the Internet. This law bars federal, state and local governments from taxing Internet access and from imposing discriminatory Internet-only taxes such as bit taxes, bandwidth taxes, and email taxes.
Clinton's support of the InternetTaxFreedomAct currently before Congress puts him at odds with the nation's governors, who want to establish a single sales tax rate for online shopping.
One notable exception was the 1998 InternetTaxFreedomAct, which prevented localities from imposing new taxes on Internet service providers. (Several states already had Web taxes in place, and Congress left them alone.) Since then, the law has been renewed several times.