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Aussie Parliamentary Inquiry Into Software Pricing Announced

Posted by Soulskill on from the but-it-takes-special-engineering-to-work-upside-down dept.

New submitter elphie007 writes "Australian consumers may finally see the end of being overcharged for software simply because they live outside the U.S. Minister for Communications Senator Stephen Conroy (champion of Australia's National Broadband Network) is reported to be finalizing the terms of reference for a parliamentary inquiry into software pricing in Australia. Last week, Adobe announced Australians would be charged up to $1,600 more for Adobe CS6. With the ongoing strength of the Aussie dollar against the U.S. dollar, Australians should really be paying less, not more for software & music purchased online."

2 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Devils Advocate by Kawahee · · Score: 4, Informative

    I went to purchase Diablo III from Blizzard's online store, and after signing in to my Australian (or SEA or whatever region) battle.net account the price went from US$Price to AU$(Price+20).

    I tried to play devils advocate on this one, and what I came up with is that bandwidth and rackspace in Australia are much more expensive than other parts of the world.

    But I get the feeling Blizzard don't have battle.net servers in Australia, and since most of their content delivery comes through Bittorrent (and who cares if they "seed" it themselves from the US with cheap bandwidth or AU), so I don't know why it costs so much more.

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  2. Re:To be fair by Zerth · · Score: 4, Informative

    The US price is 1300. Even including GST, that is in nearly double the US price. Considering the Aus $ trade for $1.04 USD, that's outrageous even including currency exchange costs.