The roots of the battle over an online sales tax go back decades before the birth of the World Wide Web. Ground zero was the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the 1967 case National Bellas Hess v. Department of Revenue of Illinois, which stated that a merchant whose only contacts with a state were by mail or common carrier lacked the “substantial nexus” that would require it to collect sales tax in the state.

That sentiment was reaffirmed by the court 25 years later in Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, when the court decided North Dakota couldn’t compel the catalog retailer to collect sales tax in the state because the merchant did not have a physical presence in the state. Even so, the opinion sought to…

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