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Unless you have been living under a rock, you are aware of California (and other) states efforts to copy New York and collect sales tax on affiliate initiated transactions. Collection of sales tax is important, and states are right to be concerned about taxes that are owed to them and not being collected.  But this is the wrong way to go about collecting this money and can easily cause more harm than good.

The California bill is Assembly Bill 178 sponsored by Assembly Member Nancy Skinner. The hearing date on Bill 178 has been scheduled for April 13, 2009.

We all learned a hard lesson in New York.  Luckily that lesson is being applied right now in California.  Action needs to be taken now while the bill is still in committee.

The PMA’s Stance

The Performance Marketing Alliance has formed a committee led by the experienced Beth Kirsch who has done lobbying at the federal level.  She has been working with a coalition led by the Chamber of Commence and the California Taxpayer’s Association that includes the big players in the Tech space. This coalition has had success with similar bills in the past. With companies like Google, Yahoo, eBay, and CJ all based here, there are a lot of big companies with vested interests that are taking actions either as part of this coalition or on their own.

The PMA is a valuable addition to this coalition because we can put a face on the issue.  We can get real people with real stories to talk about what this bill can do to them.  As such, the PMA is leading a grass-roots effort to spread the word about this to as many people in this industry as possible.  They have more in the works as well, with details coming out as they develop.  There are some more meetings today, and strategizing over the weekend.  After that, I expect to see plan laid out.

Likely there will be a need for people who can go to Sacramento, people to make appointments for in-person visits with their own representative, letter writers, and press outreach. If you can help with any of that, please contact the PMA to see how you can help.

Other Resources to Help Combat the Bill

There are other resources to check out as well. CAaffiliates.com is an ABestWeb forum for the discussion of the bill. Both Mark Welch and Scott Jangro have written excellent letter’s on the matter (Mark’s letter (pdf) and Scott’s letter) which I encourage you to read.

How Can You Help?

Discuss the bill with people. Let them know why it’s a bad idea, inform them. If you have a blog, make a post.  If you are on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. use them to spread the word and link to places where this is being talked about. Create discussion and make your voice be heard.

Read the original:
Affiliate Taxation – Time to Fight Back

Here at Revenews we strive to provide content not previously published elsewhere. The following article by longtime Revenews author Brad Waller focuses on Net Neutrality. A timely and important subject worth revisiting.

This column is an outgrowth of a post made on our internal email list. A debate was started by a discussion of the Wall Street Journal article on Google looking to embed their servers with the various cable and network providers, and the intimation that this was a violation of “Network Neutrality.” As the discussion evolved, one participant wrote “This issue is so convoluted, it will require Stephen Hawking to sort it out.”

I’m not Stephen Hawking, but I am a Physicist…

What I get out of this is that Google wants to co-locate their servers inside the facilities of the Telcos so that the pages are served faster. They are asking to pay for this, and not to exclude anyone. This is a way to reduce latency and get better performance; this is not a fast track with preferential treatment. If Google were to ask for exclusive co-location, then there might be an issue. If the service providers were to downgrade everyone else who did not pay, that would be an issue.

Has anyone ever made claims that Akamai was violating Net Neutrality? They have servers located around the globe to optimize the delivery of their customers’ content and no non-customer has complained of unfair treatment when their content was not included for free.

The Net Neutrality issue is that the Telcos want to treat traffic differently by source. One video stream might be slowed down, while another might get the fast pipe. So I may be paying for 15/5 megabit service, but my ISP might decide to throttle some new company down to 1 megabit because they are not paying the extra fee for the best service. Maybe the ISP has their own video streaming service, and they want to charge the competition a dollar a bit to transmit the data, thus cutting everyone out. Maybe they want to charge a million dollars for the service, in which case the biggest services will be able to pay, and the up and coming services will not be able to afford it and fail because customers will see really slow file uploads.

This can be particularly stifling to new services that cannot compete with the established deep pockets and cable companies. What would Twitter do if they were asked to pay a fee for every tweet that gets passed through the network providers service, or risk being “managed” to the point where the real-time benefits are eliminated. Without a revenue stream they would just go away. How about Facebook? They are just starting to monetize their service and something like this might be enough to kill them off. I’m sure that is fine for the providers. But what about consumers?

This whole issue is one of doublespeak. Net Neutrality is really free and open access for all, yet the opposition calls it excessive regulation of the Internet. Senator Ted Stevens kicked this off back in 2006 when he said, “Until somebody tells me what net neutrality means, until they can give me a definition, I don’t want it in there. Right now, nobody knows what it means, so why put it in the bill?”

If nobody knew what it meant, then how did the FCC define it in an agreement with Verizon over their acquisition of MCI in 2005 where they agreed to “adhere to ‘network neutrality’” principles adopted by the FCC earlier this year? So Verizon had to agree to abide by Net Neutrality to get their merger approved, and now that agreement periods are over these companies are arguing that these same principles that they agreed to are confusing and impossible to define, as well as being unneeded government interference with free trade.

I think this issue is too simple for the government. Neutrality at is most basic means that ISPs pass through everything that comes in exactly the same, no matter the protocol (like Comcast) or source. Just treat all Web sites and services as equals with the same access to bandwidth. That way email, Web pages, music, streaming video, P2P traffic, and yes, Google, get the same access to bandwidth without any interference or additional charge.

An ISP or bandwidth provider must route all traffic and treat it equally. Act like a switch: data in, data out.

This article originally appeared in the newsletter for the Internet Oldtimers Foundation.

See original here:

Since this type of discussion is important and it is rare for an ad network to come forth while under fire, below is the response from Mason Wiley, the SVP of Marketing for Hydra, as originally posted in the comments section Brad Waller’s article Reason #4837 Why This Industry Needs an Association and in response ultimately to Ben Edelman’s research here:

Hello, SVP of Marketing for Hydra here to throw in my 2 cents… or fuel for the fire. First off, we aren’t going to pull our ad just because the discussion puts us under a harsh spotlight. We really truly have nothing to hide. The fact that people use adware is not news. It is not illegal. Some advertisers even request it. And for the record it represents just a small fraction of our overall business.

Does allowing adware by some affiliates hurt all others? In theory, It could. Is it truly a widespread problem in reality? Frankly, we hadn’t thought of it before – as I said, it’s not a big part of our business. But now that our attention has been called to it, we’re looking into it.

If you recall, Hydra was the first to eliminate cash incentivizers due to shadiness. We have made heavy investments to provide rigorous compliance – in fact we are widely regarded as exceptionally aggressive in that area. We also spend legal and research dollars to vet claims by advertisers. And more.

I don’t bring these points up thinking they can counteract the this whole adware brouhaha. The point is this: Hydra does not wish to engage in shady black or grey hat practices – NOR do we feel it is in our economic interest to do so. Do you think we want to jeopardize the inroads we have made with major brand name advertisers in order to score a quick buck? (the answer is no) We have had great success playing by the rules… and we want to be even more successful.

So we welcome any efforts to set professional standards, monitor and police, and generally clean up the affiliate marketing space. The better advertisers understand how reputable affiliates and networks work, the safer they will feel, and the more ad dollars they’ll pump in. That would be good for affiliates. That would also be good for us. Our interests are totally aligned on that one!

Anyway it’s end of day Friday so I will stop for now. But i do look forward to continuing the discussion.

If you have your two cents about Hydra specifically, CPA networks in general, or the proliferation of adware, the comment section below is a good place to express those opinions.

See more here:
Hydra Responds