Quote:
Originally Posted by malliemcg
If you won't sell me what I want and you'll sell it to someone else because they live in a different geographic location to me, well that's irritating (I wonder if you could pull racist from it...)
|
You certainly can.
If I opened a bricks-and-mortar shop and sold my goods to everyone except, say, people who were born in China, I'd be in all sorts of trouble, and rightly so. No court in the country would accept a geographic divide-and-conquer strategy as a reasonable excuse for locking out an entire race of people.
I understand that geographic restrictions on internet sales are all about protecting local industries, but those industries have plenty of time to see change coming and act accordingly. If they're not agile enough to adapt and survive -- or, more accurately, thrive -- that's their problem; it should never be ours. Compare Kodak, which responded quickly to digital photography and succeeded, with Agfa, which didn't.
Kim Carr is leading some daft government-funded ebook strategy panel, populated with representatives of the old industry guard, to spend a year or so determining how Australia should move into ebooks. While that great lumbering dinosaur is wasting time having meetings and imagining a bright new digital economy in 2012, we're here right now trying our hardest to give them money, and they won't take it. All because we're not in the right country.
And don't start me on device lock-in. I'd be here all day.