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Which US States are e-Commerce Friendly?
pHaze asks: "I am about to take a long drive across the USA with my girlfriend to try and find a state to live in. We are both professional geeks and plan to settle and start a business. We were wondering if slashdotters could offer some advice on which state is the best to start an e-commerce business in. Which has the most e-commerce friendly/unfriendly laws (taxation, copyright, spam, privacy), the highest availability of broadband (and bandwidth in general) and is the most cost effective for a business."
A tool for finding the best place to live is online at BestPlaces.Net.
There are two versions of the tool: short (15 categories) and long (40 categories).
The tool has you rate different attributes in terms of "importance to you" and then provides a ranked list of places to live that meet your preferences.
I live right near RTP and love it. I'm in a small suburb with good surroundings. You really get the bigger city advantages with the small town appeal. Plus, it's a very tech savvy area. Raleigh was just shown to be the city with the highest rate of residential broadband acceptance in the country.
Texas does; however, have a law that says they get to collect state sales tax on EVERY e-commerce transaction that's conducted on a server within its borders. Texas is also exempt from the current federal Internet sales tax moratorium. And, that lack of state income tax, well, you really pay for it with an 8.25% state sales tax (higher in some localities). Can you imagine making a resident of another state pay a sales tax rate that is double or triple what he'd pay in his own state?
This is a *MAJOR* sticking point that is ignored by a lot of small companies that have webservers here and could easily get bit. The big companies HQ'd here -- Dell, for instance, do not keep servers within the state borders for this reason.
[Source: Report of Texas Internet Tax Policy Working Group ]