About one week after Maryland legislature voted to override the Governor’s digital ad tax veto, approving the first-of-its-kind measure, the Chamber of
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Overriding the governor’s veto of H.B. 732 (2020), the Maryland Senate on February 12, 2021 passed the nation’s first state tax on the digital advertising revenues pulled in by large companies. This development follows attempts by various other states like New York to directly regulate digital advertising and ecommerce services in new ways. We took a look at the Maryland bill to find out what advertisers need to know about its details and potential pitfalls.
Maryland State Senate President Bill Ferguson said he was inspired to push the legislation by an op-ed essay authored by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer, who observed that the business models of online digital platform companies, particularly mega-companies like Google and Facebook, have undermined the public’s trust in democratic institutions by permitting their platforms to become “havens for dangerous misinformation and hate speech,” causing erosion of “the commons