Amazon.com‘s hometown newspaper, The Seattle Times, which has its offices across the street from Amazon headquarters, has posted a firmly-worded editorial castigating the behemoth bookseller for “the company’s campaign to dodge the payment of state sales tax all across America.”

After pointing out that “The last time we commented on this was on Amazon’s bizarre contest with North Carolina,” when Amazon said it was defending the privacy of its customers, and “We said it was about the money, and that Amazon ought to pay up.”

“Now comes Texas,” the commentary continues …

… a state, like Washington, with no income tax but with a sales tax. It says Amazon owes it $269 million in sales taxes on purchases by Texas residents.

Texas can make Amazon pay if the company has a “physical presence” there. Which it does. It has a distribution center near the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. So Amazon said Feb. 10 it was closing the center April 12 and skedaddling from the state of Texas. It will sell over the Internet to customers there, but it will not have buildings or employees there.

That would have been a slick strategy for the 1990s, or maybe even today for a company nobody ever heard of. But Amazon, which ambitiously named itself for the biggest river on Earth, has become what its name implies. It is the Internet’s widest and deepest source of products, which makes it too big to be excused from its obligations.

Amazon is going to lose this fight. It knows this. It is trying to drag its feet as long as it can because it is profitable to do so.

Settle now and get it over with.