California

Is Amazon a threat to online retail in the U.S.?

Amazon has been doing battle with states over the collection of sales tax for years.

It has developed a strategy for dealing with states that propose legislation that would force it to collect sales tax as a result of its affiliate relationships: threaten to terminate affiliates in the state if the legislation is passed.

Sure enough, the e-commerce giant has consistently followed through on such threats. The result: Amazon affiliates either have to say goodbye to revenue, or flee to another state. And the states themselves don’t generate any of the revenue they thought they were losing out on in the first place.

Are affiliate programs dead in the U.S.?

Yesterday, California became the latest state to pass an affiliate tax law.

With a single stroke of a pen, California’s governor signed AB 28 1x and may have struck the biggest blow ever to the affiliate business model in the United States.

That’s because California isn’t just home to a large number of
affiliates, it is also widely considered to be the center of the
technology universe.

Will California’s woes ‘terminate’ Silicon Valley?

For years, a small region in the western United States has served as a Mecca for
technology entrepreneurs looking to follow in the footsteps of all the
great founders who built their companies in a place known as Silicon
Valley.

Companies including Intel, Apple, Google and Facebook, just to name a few, were all started in Silicon Valley, which is recognized the world over as the premiere source of so much technological innovation.

But are Silicon Valley’s better days behind it? Silicon Valley is located
in California, which was recently named the worst state to do business in
the United States according to Chief Executive Magazine’s annual Best
and Worst States for Business survey. It’s the second year in a row the
state has earned the distinction.

Is California done for as the world’s tech hub?

For those of us who don’t live in California (or even the United States), it’s understood that there are plenty of great technology companies outside of California.

But even so, California, and in particular Silicon Valley, has a reputation for being the world’s tech hub. And to be honest that’s probably fair given the number of great technology companies that have come out of California and Silicon Valley over the years.