To put this into context, the average time in 2020 for a civil case to go from filing all the way to an appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court was 185.8 days; from submission to the Supreme Court, 32.8 days [1].
California’s courts don’t publish this information regularly, but the last time I checked, the comparable statistics were 3 years and one year.
[1] https://courts.delaware.gov/aoc/annualreports/fy20/doc/2020S... page 8
Federal law does it exist, but it feels like more a set of minimal standards. Most of the differences that people pay attention to are state laws because they usually go above the federal laws and regulations.
I have trouble finding the export figures, but there's this:
> The global media and entertainment market was worth $1.9 trillion in 2016, with extrapolations ranging to $2.14 trillion by 2020. About one third of the total ($735 billion in 2017) is made up by the U.S. entertainment industry.
Edit: seems the export figure is quite a bit smaller, CNN lists tv/movies together with software at 49 billion: https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/07/news/economy/top-us-exports...
The tech will be figured out elsewhere. The data center outside of the region would be fine.
Is this really that unusual though? And, to the degree it is, how many other large countries have the same sort of distributed large population centers?
Despite Australia seeming like the perfect candidate for this due to having approximately five cities of note, all spread out over an area larger than the contiguous US, there's basically no industrial specialisation on a per-city basis here.
Here's the closest examples I can think of:
The area surrounding Brisbane/Gold Coast is home to a large number of the nation's major theme parks and similar attractions (think any things named "<Noun> World"), but that makes a lot of sense for tourism purposes.
Melbourne is the sporting capital of the world, but every other city in Australia also has an extremely strong sporting culture, so even though Melbourne has most of the biggest events (Australian Open, AFL Grand Final, the F1 race that they stole from Adelaide, the Boxing Day Test, etc), everywhere else is usually still packing out 50,000+ seat stadiums for various football codes or cricket on a weekly basis anyway, so it's definitely not anywhere near the level of exclusivity that somewhere like Hollywood enjoys.
Then you've got theater in Sydney, but like theme parks that's fairly normal for the industry, and it's not a permanent exclusivity but more of a timed thing where shows start to travel after having been exclusively in Sydney for a certain period of time.
That said, my understanding is that China is a very close fit to this discussion. Unfortunately I only know enough to list one example - Shenzhen, the place where basically every cheap electronical component is made - but I've definitely seen dozens of articles about various different hyper-specialised cities in China. I suppose it helps when the government can just go "hrm, we want to be better at this industry, let's build a 1mil population city specifically focused around it".
Funny you should mention Melbourne. It is a good historical example of a city fueled by an industry. It grew out of the Victorian Gold Rush in 1850's and 60's.
Melbourne went from less than 75k population to 500k in a 10 year period which was massive growth.
At one point it was the richest city in the world. The legacy from all this still exists today. It is why a lot of Australian banks etc are Headquartered in Melbourne, because they have their roots in gold rush.
This is a common market flexing its economies of scale. India and China do similarly. If the EU could get its act together, it, too, would reap these benefits.
They and any state could always lean on Delaware case law
And if you don't like Delaware established precedent then you can argue for the opposite in any other state (like Wyoming) where the judges are less bound to the established case law
Delaware is overrated
The race to the bottom never ended and is much larger than a collection of states, it is international with many permutations and many legislatures interested in attracting business, because they're a business too
That's the opposite of what you want.
I could play this game for the next 300 years before people catch on or fundamentally change anything about the nation state/jurisdiction/case law concept
But rarely do businesses know which precedents they'll want to challenge at incorporation time, so it's advantageous to go with the state that is the most predictable and whose court system is relatively efficient.
protip: that doesn't require original incorporation in that state. delaware is overrated, QED.
I am not ascribing ill motive to the author. Just incompetence in trying to write about a very complex topic that is far out of his depth, and doesn't allow for simple moralistic summaries like "Big biz not paying their fair share!".
I don't think it would be far fetched to think that the content should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism ?
I dropped a few Google Street View pins randomly around Delaware and it looked pretty dated to me. Schools that look like jails, houses made of wood, potholed roods, narrow non-ADA-compliant sidewalks, and hardly any modern shiny train service. Aren't they scooping up trillions in taxes? Why aren't they building the next Shanghai/Silicon Valley/Singapore/whatever with that cash?
It's really hard to believe from Street View that this is the place where big corporations are registered.
Or take some African countries with Diamonds.
My point is that because you have a revenue source / competent niche, that does not guarantee a competent government. Usually the only thing you can guarantee is that unplanned riches or resources will lead to waste and corruption. Its not an accident that the norwegian sovereign fund is an rarity, not a rule.
I am curious if there is a genesis to the level of crime and abandonment so pervasive in DE.... from the success DE enjoyed early on, via corp registration riches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-...
Indeed, even the Geoffrey case the article notes is famous for Geoffrey losing in South Carolina, and having its income taxed in that state.
Nonbusiness income is taxed to commercial domicile, which does promote moving headquarters to a tax haven. But much less income is considered nonbusiness income than you’d expect, and further commercial domicile is a separate concept from place of incorporation.
By far the dominant reason for Delaware as a corporate place of incorporation is its well developed corporate law and courts. It is more favorable to corporations in part, but not excessively so—VCs would not be pressuring corporations to incorporate in Delaware if it purely screwed shareholders at the corporation’s benefit.
There are also estate planning and asset protection benefits of using Delaware (and certain other states) LLCs.