Senate passes Internet sales tax proposal
The U.S. Senate has overwhelmingly passed a nonbinding proposal to allow states to collect sales tax on Internet sellers that have no presence within their borders.
The proposal was an amendment to a 2014 budget bill that the Senate debated Friday. It was pushed by Sens. Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, and Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and was designed to give backers a sense of whether they had enough votes to push forward with final legislation to impose an Internet sales tax.
The vote showed they have plenty of backing to overcome any filibuster seeking to block a final sales tax bill. Sixty votes are needed to overcome a filibuster, and senators voted 75-24 for the nonbinding resolution. The Enzi and Durbin amendment would allow the Senate Budget Committee to include the sales tax in the budget, providing it does not increase the federal deficit. Read more...
Senate to look at Mozilla’s browser competition allegations
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will look into accusations by Mozilla that Microsoft is restricting access to important programming tools for browsers that will run in Windows RT, a political blog reported Friday.
The Hill cited unnamed aides to Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, as the source for its report.
Last week, Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, said Microsoft was withholding access to APIs -- application programming interfaces -- that Mozilla considers crucial for building a browser that can compete with Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) on ARM devices. Read more...
House vote sets up Senate cybersecurity showdown
The House's solid bipartisan vote for a cybersecurity bill sends a message to the Senate: Now it's your turn to act.
Ignoring a White House veto threat, the House approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which would encourage companies and the federal government to share information collected on the Internet to help prevent electronic attacks from cybercriminals, foreign governments and terrorists.
The vote Thursday was 248-168, with 42 Democrats joining 206 Republicans in backing the measure. Read more...
Senate bill would add protections for mobile users’ location data
Sen. Al Franken isn’t happy about the prospect of mobile operating system developers like Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT) and Research In Motion (RIMM) gathering users’ location data and sharing it without their permission.
The Minnesota democrat introduced the bill along with Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on Wednesday, which would require mobile companies like Google and Apple and app developers to ask users for their explicit permission before sharing location data gathered by mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, with any third parties. Read more...