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Aussie Parliamentary Inquiry Into Software Pricing Announced
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 $1,600 more for Adobe CS6. With the ongoing strength of the Aussie dollar against the U.S. dollar, Australians should really be paying less, not more for software & music purchased online."
Translating text and manuals to Australian isn't free.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If we lose the better beaches tax does that mean that New Zealand has better beaches than us?
I went to purchase Diablo III from Blizzard's online store, and after signing in to my Australian (or SEA or whatever region) battle.net account the price went from US$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.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
We Australians pay high prices for a simple reason - our market can bear the prices. The strong Australian dollar coincides with higher wages and costs of living, and any professional who needs photoshop will buy it, albeit begrudgingly. Adobe provides discounts for students and other groups, but the prices are still quite high.
This is basic economics: charge as much as possible to each customer, also known as price discrimination.
The same goes for "luxury" cars. Let me give an example. Here in Australia a new BMW M3's recommended retail price is $154,000 AUD. In the US, it is around $60,000 USD. Government taxes, extras, shipping costs, etc only account for a very small percentage of this difference. How does BMW sell any cars in Australia? Enough people are willing and able to pay the price.
Excellent. I'm sick of the exploitation of software pricing in Australia. Price ratios haven't shifted at all since the 90s when the AUD was worth 0.6 USD. Now 1 AUD > 1 USD.
Instead of this ad-hoc 'inquiry' nonsense, which is necessarily reactive and highly liable to regulatory capture, why don't we just adopt some of that 'free trade' stuff that assorted Respectable People tell us is so salubrious when the chaps who produce the products in question are shopping around for the cheapest inputs?
Absent legal barriers, arbitrage in software should cost next to nothing, especially now that much of it doesn't even come on shiny disks anymore. See to it that Australian customers can legally import goods from the location of their choice, and that middlemen can import goods from the location of their choice for domestic sale, and the price difference should collapse in a loud puff of nebulous whining about 'intellectual property'...
The whole notion behind the term 'grey market' is pernicious. It Should Not Matter whether the manufacturer/seller of a good is pleased by the ultimate destination of the goods they are selling. Yes, we would all like to enjoy perfect price discrimination. No, that isn't a good argument for letting us do so. In the absence of absurd restrictions on arbitrage, various pricing shenanigans, release-date bullshit, and other nonsense simply collapse.
Such restrictions would be one thing if they were applied evenhandedly, if the producers weren't already shopping all over the world for the lowest prices, laxest laws, and sweetest tax breaks; but they are not. You want cozy protectionism for your retail prices? Well, perhaps you shouldn't expect to enjoy worldwide free trade on your input prices... You want worldwide free trade for the things you buy? Well, that's nice, you deserve no less than worldwide free trade in the things you sell.
Wrong train of thought. Australian import duties are quite low for most goods (alcohol and tobacco are exceptions). For the most part all you really need to do is pay 10% tax on a container load of goods.
But the problem goes way beyond. I ordered a camera lens from B&H in the USA. I paid $70 shipping. It was over $1000 so I paid 10% tax ($180), it arrived on the weekend so I got a double whamy of a customs good holding fee $50, and for some reason UPS charged me again for the privilege of customs delays $30. I paid a total of $300 to get this over the listed USA price and the end result was it was still $250 cheaper than the cheapest price I could find anywhere in Australia.
ebay thing? For that the problem is Australia Post. I received a faulty product from America. USPS shipping was $7 to get this thing slightly larger then a letter over here. The company asked to ship it back and I went to the local post office. Our post office said it was slightly too thick to be a letter, no matter we'll send it to the USA for $55. !!!!!!! My father is CEO of a direct marketing company here. They have some 10000 subscribers in the USA and they have worked out it is cheaper to get the letters printed in Germany and bulk shipped to Hungary where they get inserted into envelopes and sent via Hungarian Post to the USA than it is to print them themselves and ship them direct to the USA. Can't do it internal to the USA unfortunately due to some rules about the contents of the mailings.
This is Australia. Everything is upside down here remember? We enjoy getting raped in the wallet here mate.