This article describes Wayfair and provides some cautions about what it means for the U.S. states and the rest of the world, especially Europe. It concludes that the lesson is that we should be sure that we like our temporary solution to the digital tax problem, because temporary solutions have a way of sticking around long after everyone recognizes that they no longer work. The Bellas Hess Court thought it was deciding a case about mail-order-catalog sales, and it could not have predicted that its decision would turn out to have such profound implications for e-commerce. The European Commission carefully formulated its Digital Services Tax (DST) proposal to tax certain digital giants operating today. But the DST may prove unworkable for business models we cannot even imagine yet. And, as Congress learned after Quill (and the OECD members are experiencing with the PE threshold), powerful business interests have a way of keeping in place outmoded, but precise, tax thresholds long after they have stopped making sense as a practical matter. The details of the DST may mean that it hits the (mostly U.S.) companies the EU has within its sights, but it also may take some of the oomph out of the drive for more meaningful and general reform (like modifications to the PE definition) that would be robust against changes in how companies operate. Take it from this American: You don’t want the DST to be the next Quill, an anachronistic bar on taxation of new forms of business.
More in This Category
The chapter provides an introduction to issues involving single people and the law. Accordingly, it explores legal approaches to singlehood and non...
When governments issue bonds they usually have to provide plenty of disclosure to entice investors. These days this often includes information on the...
Alex Wentker’s book, which will stand as the definitive work on co-party status for years, offers an extremely careful and comprehensive look at the...
The government’s attempt to remove Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident (LPR) of the United States and student at Columbia University, is a...
Donald Trump, a president who has proven himself to be highly transactional and keen on reducing debt, may find a potentially trillion-dollar foreign...
Virtue jurisprudence is an approach to normative legal theory that answers normative questions about law from a perspective that is centred on the...
Crosspollination between the transitional justice (tj) and business and human rights (B&H) fields has led to a growing scholarly focus on the role of...
Musk’s attempts to gain access to agency databases is an egregious violation of the act, which protects personal information from abuse.
Under the...
Between November and December 2024, news articles reported widespread incidents of small- and medium-sized drones flying across northeastern U.S...
National security decisions pose a paradox: they are among the most consequential a government can make, but are generally the least transparent to...
Ethan Mollick recently wrote about the paradoxical nature of knowing when to use AI and when not to use AI in 15 Times to Use AI, and 5 Not To...
Until he joined the U.S. government in 1934, Robert H. Jackson had been a lawyer in private practice in Upstate New York who was admitted to the bar...
Scholars regard the 1923 League of Nations experts’ report as the origin of the international tax system as we know it. The experts’ report noted the...
This Chapter discusses citizenship taxation as a potential solution to the challenges posed by increasing global mobility and the digitalization of...
Although research suggests that countries' colonial experiences are associated with a range of contemporary outcomes, the link between colonial...
In a new paper, we present a novel theory of “purposeful enterprise” to explain why nonprofit enterprises survive and thrive. We define nonprofit...
Children should be seen and not heard, or so the old saying goes. A new version of this adage is now playing out across the United States, as more...
CC/Devas (Mauritius) Limited v. Antrix Corp.: International Arbitration and Constitutional Avoidance
I suspect that CC/Devas (Mauritius) Limited v. Antrix Corp. Ltd. caught the eye of the Supreme Court because of an interesting constitutional question...