this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Price discrimation? To who, average people living in rich developed countries that can afford to pay for $10 a month for multiple services and whose salaries are at least three to four times the average of someone living in a poor developing nation?
My dude, you don't pay more, you pay the standard baseline price anyone in your situation pays. People in developing countries are lucky if they get the chance to pay the equivalent in their purchasing power and not ten times the amount while having a fraction of your wealth just because they didn't luck out their birth place. Regional pricing helps poor people get something they potentially would never have the change to get legally, it's objectively a good thing in the capitalist hellhole we live in. Without it people will have to resort to piracy and stealing, and while I don't have anything against piracy I sure as hell would love to live in a world where everyone could afford according to their needs and piracy as a necessary evil would be relegated to the past.
Price discrimination just means charging different prices to different customers based on what you think you know about them. Its benign form would be a market vendor asking higher prices of individual people who look like they can afford it, and then really fleecing the tourists who look like they'll fall for it. In that form it looks perfectly wholesome compared to what the big corporations get up to today: Supermarkets selling smaller package sizes in poor areas at lower sticker price but higher unit price, airlines asking different ticket prices depending what they know about your web browsing history, et cetera. I do not rate it a good thing overall. Even if we take it for granted that international borders are a thing, and services can't be intermediated or subjected to arbitrage, the rich man in a luxury condo in Brazil paying less for some thing than the minimum-wage worker in New York does not strike me as reflecting any kind of justice.
But this is the Internet. International borders are not supposed to be a thing here, and still aren't for the most part despite the best efforts of the most repressive governments to change that. The cost of shipping data from one side of the world to the other is effectively zero. The system where it's broadly true that different parts of the world have vastly different purchasing power is an injustice, it's not something we should be attempting to replicate in cyberspace. I can route my network packets so that they appear to be coming from any region I choose, and so can anyone who can afford Netflix in any country. It's not a freedom I want to give up so that big streaming services can extract maximum revenue from each national market separately.