In case you haven't been paying attention, there's a battle currently being waged in Congress over extending the Internet Tax Fairness Act of 1998 which established a moratorium on local and state governments imposing sales or access taxes on the Internet.

The law was extended in 2001 and 2004, but expires in exactly one month, on November 1. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and John Sununu (R-NH) are fighting to extend the full moratorium, while Senators Tom Carper (D-DE) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) are pushing a "watered down" or "compromise" piece of legislation that would allow state and local governments to continue collecting access fees on telephone and cable television on telecom companies that are now "bundling" those services along with high-speed Internet.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has been an outspoken advocate of not just extending the moratorium but of making it permanent:

"If Americans want to know what their Internet access bill will look like if this moratorium expires, all they need to do is look at their phone bill. Taxes and government fees add as much as 20 percent to Americans' telephone and cell-phone bills. We can't let that happen to the Internet, which is likely the most popular invention since the light bulb."

The debate over taxing the Internet is serious business, literally: Internet sales topped $100 billion in 2006 and more than 212 million Americans (70.2% of the population) are now connected to the Internet. One of the most basic lessons of economics is that the more you tax something, the less you get of it. The last thing Congress needs to do is to allow taxes to drag down one of the major economic engines in the country.