Congress in 1998 passed a law cheekily called the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which banned the taxation of internet access, as well as special taxes on internet companies. Since state politicians were no more knowledgeable than anyone else about how to levy sales taxes on computerized transactions they never saw, the government had effectively conferred tax exemption on the new online book emporium Amazon, and with it a multi-percentage-point pricing advantage over brick-and-mortar stores that would allow the company to crush all of the country’s nationwide book chains and major independent
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