Mark Pryor: “I wish to talk about amendment No. 740, which is an amendment I am offering with the Senator from Missouri, Mr. Blunt.…”

“I wish to talk about amendment No. 740, which is an amendment I am offering with the Senator from Missouri, Mr. Blunt. We understand there will be an objection to this. I will not ask unanimous consent to call it up at this moment. Hopefully, one of our colleagues will arrive in a minute to do that. Let me say first that I am for the Marketplace Fairness Act. I am a cosponsor. I believe it is the right thing to do. It is an issue I have been working on since my time more than 10 years ago in the attorney general's office in the State of Arkansas when we were trying to set up a multistate compact about how to collect sales tax on the Internet. This is taxes on Internet sales on the Internet. What I am talking about today, the Pryor-Blunt amendment, is different. We are talking about amendment No. 740, which is sometimes confused with it, but basically amendment No. 740 deals with the Internet Tax Freedom Act--sometimes called ITFA, of all things--but nonetheless, basically it does just a few things. First, it makes it clear that online retailers will not begin to have to pay additional tax just for doing business online. So the way this works is that right now States and cities, counties, et cetera, are prohibited from taxing Internet service. We are not talking about sales tax, we are talking about Internet service, the Internet service itself. This is a moratorium that has been around for a long time. Amendment No. 740 is the amendment that would extend this for 10 years.…”