I'm also Australian and didn't realise it was because of this. Actually, I'm still skeptical this is the main reason since it's like a 260ms round trip to East

I'm also Australian and didn't realise it was because of this. Actually, I'm still skeptical this is the main reason since it's like a 260ms round trip to East coast USA. Let's say the latency for someone not living on our big old island is 80ms round trip. I don't think the extra 180ms will make that big of a difference if the app is well designed. That's still enough time to detect scrolling and have the new data ready by the time the user turns the mouse wheel twice. I should add that I've always suspected a lot of developers don't test their apps with latency in mind, so they make silly decisions like serial requests, etc. They never see how awful the experience is for someone not living next door to their data centre.