Wyden considers Netflix tax

By Taxpayers Association of Oregon Foundation,

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has been working with Idaho Senator Mike Crapo on creating a digital service tax somewhat modeled after Europe.  Within Europe there are different models and proposals that target different digital services such as streaming, digital products, software, advertising and collecting consumer information.

This means Wyden’s proposal could end up taxing Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and Disney+ for providing digital streaming services to customers. This would be an interesting tax question for how it applies to Amazon Prime, which is primarily a delivery discount service that offers free videos and movies as a secondary benefit to signing up for the service.

Wyden’s rush to consider a tax on Netflix comes at a time of declining streaming customers and slow ad sales. Many streaming services like Disney+ have not even recorded a single year of profit since they were created.