It's never a good thing when a business gets a tax named after it.

But that's what's happening with Amazon.com.

Amazon is fighting hard to protect its business model. Why wouldn't it? By not collecting sales taxes, Amazon undersells traditional stores and has become the world's largest Internet retailer with $34 billion in revenue last year.

The Seattle-based Internet giant finds itself in the political fight of its young but rich life against competitors that have formed an organization with the Norman Rockwell-ish name – Alliance for Main Street Fairness.

There's nothing quaint about the alliance, as became evident last week.

In a two-day period, lawmakers merged three bills that had been wending their way through the process, created one big budget-related measure to require that Internet retailers collect sales taxes, and swiftly approved it.

Gov. Jerry Brown is mulling whether to sign what Capitol denizens call the "Amazon tax" bill.

"I wouldn't take sole credit for it. A lot people worked on it," Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Association, a key part of the alliance, said of last week's legislative maneuver.

Amazon's immediate fight is over whether to collect sales taxes. But the broader battle is for retail supremacy. Small merchants, particularly bookstore owners, are the public face of the anti-Amazon effort. They're certainly affected. But the true struggle is among retail giants.

Wal-Mart is one of the main backers of the campaign – and it is a campaign – and is bent on ensuring that the world's largest Internet retailer doesn't become the world's largest retailer, a perch held by Wal-Mart.

The campaign is being waged in a dozen states this year. Neither side discloses the cost of the campaign. But the alliance is spending millions on organizing, television ads, lobbying and more.

Wal-Mart may pay low wages to its workers. But it's not one to scrimp on politics. The Arkansas-based company has spent more than $11 million on campaign donations in California alone during the past decade and another $2.3 million on lobbying in Sacramento.

The political consulting firm of FP1 Strategies based in Washington, D.C., is overseeing the anti-Amazon retailers' campaign nationally. FP1 – short for 50 plus one – includes bare-knuckled veterans of the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and John McCain, and other Republicans.

"Amazon's position is not sustainable," said Danny Diaz, the FP1 partner who handles Alliance for Main Street Fairness account. "They're going to be collecting sales taxes. It is not a question of 'if.' It is, 'when.' "

Amazon is a relative newcomer to lobbying in statehouses, but is learning fast. It is part of the Internet Alliance, an association that includes other tech heavyweights as Facebook, Comcast, Google and e-Bay. Amazon would not comment, except to issue a statement saying it hopes for a "national solution," not one imposed state-by-state.

States, however, are motivated by budget deficits. In California, lawmakers are trying to find money wherever they can to close a $10 billion budget gap, and believe they have found a rich vein in Internet vendors. Staffers estimate the Amazon tax bill would generate $300 million a year. Maybe.

The measure almost certainly will be tied up in a court fight that could drag on for years. Amazon has legal justification for its position. A 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling held that a mail order office supply company didn't have to collect sales taxes in North Dakota because it had no physical presence in that state.

Internet retailers are like the old mail order companies, only on growth hormones. Given the direction commerce is headed, Internet retailers ought to collect sales taxes. The issue also raises broader questions about California's antiquated sales tax system.

California's sales tax rate, 8.25 percent, is the nation's highest. The state exempts all food, no matter if it's a candy bar or broccoli; all prescription drugs; all services such as accounting, dry cleaning and the law; and all leisure activities such as golfing and entertainment. None of that makes sense.

Although Internet retailers don't collect sales taxes, Californians are supposed to pay a closely related tax called a "use tax" on such purchases.

The use tax has been around since the 1930s. But it was widely ignored until Assemblyman Charles Calderon, D-Whittier, carried 2009 legislation requiring that all businesses with annual sales of $100,000 or more file use tax returns. That legislation has resulted in $68 million in added tax revenue, a fraction of the amount that could be collected.

Amazon no doubt has taken business from bookstores. But no retailer has had a worse impact on Main Street business than Wal-Mart, its role in the Alliance for Main Street Fairness notwithstanding.

Democrats routinely carry anti-Wal-Mart bills to mess with the fiercely anti-union retailer. Sen. Juan Vargas, a San Diego Democrat, is pushing a union-backed bill to require that big-box stores produce economic impact reports before opening if they sell groceries.

Of course, there are no permanent enemies in politics. Vargas, other Democrats and unions are backing the big-box stores' push for the Amazon tax.

"Even the devil gets it right sometimes," Vargas said.

More often, though, the "devil" commits acts of deviltry.

Rummage around Walmart.com, and you'll find you can buy items from a variety of Wal-Mart affiliates. One is CSN Stores. It happily proclaims that "one of the best things about buying through CSN Stores is that we do not have to charge sales tax."

Perhaps we should dub it the CSN Stores tax. Nah, Amazon tax has a better ring.

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