The U.S. House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly in favor of a motion that calls on the World Trade Organization to enact a permanent moratorium on electronic commerce taxes during its meeting next month in Seattle.
The House passed the concurrent resolution by a vote of 423 to 1, says Paul J. Wilkinson, a spokesman for the bill's sponsor, Representative Chris Cox [R-Calif.]. The resolution has the support of the Clinton administration, Wilkinson says. Wilkinson did not know who cast the lone vote against the resolution.
At last year's WTO meeting, the U.S. pushed through an agreement among the more than 130 WTO member countries to support a one-year moratorium on Internet taxes. Today's resolution seeks to preserve the status quo, as none of the members currently tax e-commerce, Wilkinson says.
The resolution passed by the House, known as the Global Internet Tax Freedom Act, also calls on the Paris Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to support the moratorium and enact no taxes on the Internet or on e-commerce. The resolution also condemns the so-called "bit tax" proposed last summer in a United Nations report. The bit tax would impose tariffs on electronically delivered information based on the amount of data transmitted.
Cox and Senator Ron Wyden [D-Ore.] and the Senate sponsor of the Global Internet Tax Freedom Act, have teamed up as sponsors of a number of Internet taxation bills, including last year's Internet Tax Freedom Act, which placed a three-year moratorium on special taxation of the Internet in the U.S.
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