by Jamie Dettmer

About the author: Jamie Dettmer is senior editor of Insight on the News magazine.

Maybe writing a lament for the freewheeling ways of the Internet would be premature. After all, the battle to protect the freedom of cyberspace from regulatory interference hardly has commenced, and taxes have not yet been imposed on e-sales in either the United States or Europe. But already there are those lusting to tame the wild of cyberspace with the lassos and hobbles of government control and taxes.

Here in the United States most of the nation’s governors are intensifying their campaigns to get Congress to approve a sales tax on Internet commerce. [In fall 2001] all House and Senate members received a letter from 40 governors urging that there be no extension of a 1998 moratorium on...