A provision in Maryland’s digital ad tax is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The 2021 law — the first of its kind in the nation — imposes taxes on large tech companies for the digital ads they sell within the state. But it also prohibits those companies from passing the tax on to consumers as a surcharge, fee or line item on their bills — what a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saw as a ban on telling customers about the new added tax.

In a ruling that invoked American protests against the Colonial-era Stamp Act, Circuit Judge Julius Richardson wrote that, as then, “complaining about taxes remains a grand American political tradition.” And the court said Maryland lawmakers went too far by adding language to th

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