Baltimore Sun Op-Ed Urging Veto of MD Digital Ad Tax

Today's edition of the Baltimore Sun features an op-ed that Free State Foundation President Randolph J. May and I wrote regarding the ill-conceived, and first of its kind, tax on digital advertising recently passed by the Maryland General Assembly.

In a blog post on March 13, we addressed the shortcomings of what at the time was pending legislation. An effort to generate additional revenues for education based upon a proposal conceived to discourage targeted advertising, Senate Bill 2 inappropriately singled out one form of commercial speech – digital, but not traditional – advertising, in violation of both specific federal law and the First Amendment.

It targeted large platforms (e.g., those that generate more than $100 million in annual gross revenues) with a tax ranging from 2.5 to 10 percent of annual gross revenues derived from "digital advertising services," unduly burdening interstate commerce – and implicating the Commerce Clause – by sweeping in revenues generated both in other states and globally.

And it relied upon an unworkable mechanism to determine when digital advertising is provided within Maryland's borders.

Nevertheless, on March 18, Maryland's legislature adopted an amended version of S.B. 2, House Bill 732. H.B. 732 responds to that last critique – S.B. 2's failure to identify accurately in-state digital advertising – by punting the question to a future rulemaking by the Comptroller. Otherwise, it suffers from all of the flaws we identified in S.B. 2.

The FSF op-ed, which urges Maryland Governor Larry Hogan to veto this misguided bill, can be found here.