California Governor Talks About Best Buy Like It’s 2004: ‘I’m Paying Sales Tax On A Lot Of This Prewritten Software’
California Governor Gavin Newsom is advocating for a sales tax on digital software, citing a personal experience at Best Buy. He argues that residents who purchase software online are not paying the same taxes as those buying in-store. Critics suggest his views on technology are outdated and not reflective of current consumer behavior.
- ▪Governor Newsom proposed a new sales tax on digital software in California.
- ▪He expressed frustration that he pays sales tax on software while others download it tax-free.
- ▪Critics believe Newsom's perspective on technology is stuck in the past.
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Record
| Original publisher | Kotaku |
| Canonical URL | https://kotaku.com/california-governor-talks-about-best-buy-like-its-2004-im-paying-sales-tax-on-a-lot-of-this-prewritten-software-2000697058 |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 15:30:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T15:34:56.674Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T15:34:56.674Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | E5RLGkvR6tjz |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
California Governor Talks About Best Buy Like It’s 2004: ‘I’m Paying Sales Tax On A Lot Of This Prewritten Software’ Gavin Newsom, what are you talking about? Best BuyGavin Newsom By Ethan Gach Published May 18, 2026 | Comments (0) | 𝕏 Copied! NBC Universal California Governor Gavin Newsom is proposing a new sales tax on digital software and making his point about it in the weirdest way possible. He claims to shop at Best Buy all of the time, but I’m not convinced he’s even used a computer since Windows Vista. Last week, Newsom took a break from podcasting and shitposting about President Trump to argue that California’s state sales tax of 7.5 percent should apply to software companies too, many of which are based in his state.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Kotaku.
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