Re:Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection
by tzs on Friday August 23, 2019 @06:01PM
(#20783123)
Another barrier to models where users pay directly is taxes.
If you come to my site, and I take money from an advertiser to show you an ad, I simply add that money into the income for my business on my Federal and state tax filings.
If you come to my site, and pay me to view my content, then in addition to dealing with that money as income, I also have to worry about whether I owe sales tax to your state or VAT to your country.
Worse, in many states that tax rate depends on your address, so I'll need to get that from you.
To make micropayments work for web content, someone is going to have to offer a service that integrates the micropayment system with a sales tax/VAT collecting and reporting system. You probably have to set it up so it is actually that service that is selling the content to the end users, so that the sites themselves do not have to deal with the states at all. That may require the service to act as some sort of portal that the users go through to reach the sites.
If you come to my site, and I take money from an advertiser to show you an ad, I simply add that money into the income for my business on my Federal and state tax filings.
If you come to my site, and pay me to view my content, then in addition to dealing with that money as income, I also have to worry about whether I owe sales tax to your state or VAT to your country.
Worse, in many states that tax rate depends on your address, so I'll need to get that from you.
To make micropayments work for web content, someone is going to have to offer a service that integrates the micropayment system with a sales tax/VAT collecting and reporting system. You probably have to set it up so it is actually that service that is selling the content to the end users, so that the sites themselves do not have to deal with the states at all. That may require the service to act as some sort of portal that the users go through to reach the sites.