It’s morning on January 24, 1848, and a sawmill operator notices some shiny flecks in the American River just downstream of his mill. The Gold Rush is on, and San Francisco explodes from a village of 200 to a boomtown of 36,000.
Nearly 200 years later, a new breed of San Francisco-area companies are mining a new form of gold. Except, instead of yellow metal, they’re digging for personal data. And state governments are still struggling to tax the boom. Two law school professors have just released a paper in the Notre Dame Law Review advocating one possible solution.
Their answer: a digital service tax like the one recently adopted in Maryland.
