President Clinton told a technology conference in San Francisco yesterday that he was giving his support to the Internet Tax Freedom Act, the bill currently before Congress which seeks to establish a moratorium on taxing Internet commerce, despite pressure from the National Governor’s Association to impose taxes. He told attendees at the BankAmerica Robertson Stephens conference that there are 30,000 separate tax authorities in the United States – all struggling to come to grips with this phenomenon [the internet] with only their existing old tax methods to apply to a very new world. Currently, taxing goods and services over the internet is usually limited to those goods shipped within the same state, and doesn’t apply to out of state sales. There should be no special breaks for the internet, but we can’t allow unfair taxation to weigh it down and stunt the growth of the most promising new economic opportunity in decades he said. The President’s address went down well with the audience of technology executives at San Francisco’s Ritz Carlton Hotel, despite reports suggesting that he might not support the full six year time span for no taxes proposed by the Bill. He told the conference he was committed to listening to the concerns of the governors in order to establish rules that are pre-growth, non-discriminatory, but will provide appropriate revenues for public purposes. He said he expected the legislation to have the support of both parties. And the President said he’d asked the Secretary of the Treasury to work with international trading partners to prevent new or discriminatory taxes on global electronic commerce, and was working with the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development to prevent such discrimination. Separately, the President announced an expansion of the $110m National Science Foundation funded next-generation Internet 2 scheme, with support for 29 more universities to be connected up to the vBNS very high performance Backbone Network Service, bringing the total number of participating universities up to 92. The President spent the previous evening in San Francisco at a $10,000 a seat fundraising dinner, whose attendees included Apple Computer Inc chairman Steve Jobs and Novell Inc CEO Eric Scmidt.
