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companies but I have not seen a comparison of Internet/non-Internet incomes that even
mentions the second problem.
One way that we can get an idea of this impact would be by examining where
revenues are derived for companies that only exist on the Internet. There are two such
companies that could prove quite useful for this task. Ebay and Amazon.com have many
features that make them prime candidates for consideration in a comparison between U.S.
based income versus non-U.S. based income. Both companies are large and very well
known. Moreover, both are the leading companies in their respective fields of business.
Both companies operate entirely through the Internet and it is common for companies to
separate international earning from national earnings. This circumvents the problem of
disaggregating Internet from non-Internet earnings. Finally, both companies make their
annual reports available on the Internet, which makes the process easier.
Using these reports from 2002, the following information is available.
Amazon.com reports net sales of $1.17 billion outside of the North American sites. This
is a rise from $381 million in 2000. Total net sales for these two years were $3.932 and
$2.761 billion respectively. This means that the company is increasingly pulling in
money from outside the United States, not just as a total that could be accounted for by
rising prices but also as a percentage of income. In terms of percentage, it went from
13.8% of net sales to 29.8% over two years. Please note that these figures are for sales
from the foreign sites, excluding Canada.
This exclusion means that there are two factors that would alter these percentages.
The first is that Canada should be switched over and counted with the international sites.
The second is that sales from the international sites to people living in the United States
Convention