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Here's something that infuriates me more. I go to canistream.it to find that a movie is available for rental on iTunes for $2.99. I then open iTunes to find tha

Here's something that infuriates me more. I go to canistream.it to find that a movie is available for rental on iTunes for $2.99. I then open iTunes to find that here in Australia they will charge me $4.99 Australian, which is $4.42 USD. I'd rather rent legally, but it infuriates me to see this global discriminatory price gouging.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
But the additional cost goes to flipping the closed captioning upside-down :-) In fairness, I feel your pain. The situation in Canada is similar with all digital content, to the extent that I keep my Kindle linked to my amazon.com account because about half the books I read aren't available on amazon.ca. I've even on occasion twiddled things so I appear to be living in France so I can buy content from amazon.fr. Which is insane: I could fly to France, buy the physical book there, read it there, and come back. Or I could bring it back and pay a trivial duty/GST on it. But make it digital and suddenly it's magically impossible to sell it to me? And the Daily Show etc frequently have next-day availability in the US but show up weeks or months later in Canada. Frustrating. There is a fundamental disconnect between what we have come to expect of the 'Net (worldwide seamless connectivity) and what corporations and governments are increasingly dedicated to delivering (nationalist walled gardens.) Personally, I'm betting on the 'Net to win this particular fight, although if governments and corporations behaved with economic rationality the technological solution to cross-border accessibility--including duties--would be pretty trivial. Anyone who has worked in internationalization will tell you that simply implementing a few well-defined zone-specific additional charges is trivial compared to the wacky linguistic nonsense that has to be dealt with.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

But the additional cost goes to flipping the closed captioning upside-down :-) In fairness, I feel your pain. The situation in Canada is similar with all digital content, to the extent that I keep my Kindle linked to my amazon.com account because about half the books I read aren't available on amazon.ca. I've even on occasion twiddled things so I appear to be living in France so I can buy content from amazon.fr. Which is insane: I could fly to France, buy the physical book there, read it there, and come back. Or I could bring it back and pay a trivial duty/GST on it. But make it digital and suddenly it's magically impossible to sell it to me? And the Daily Show etc frequently have next-day availability in the US but show up weeks or months later in Canada. Frustrating. There is a fundamental disconnect between what we have come to expect of the 'Net (worldwide seamless connectivity) and what corporations and governments are increasingly dedicated to delivering (nationalist walled gardens.) Personally, I'm betting on the 'Net to win this particular fight, although if governments and corporations behaved with economic rationality the technological solution to cross-border accessibility--including duties--would be pretty trivial. Anyone who has worked in internationalization will tell you that simply implementing a few well-defined zone-specific additional charges is trivial compared to the wacky linguistic nonsense that has to be dealt with.