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by lotsofpulp 3399 days ago
I think it also has something to do with price discrimination. A seller can maximize profit if they can come closest to charging the maximum the buyers are willing to pay. So for goods where the cost to make a copy is negligible, such as media and books, the ideal pricing strategy is to sell the product at different prices to different markets, hence why you see versions of the same textbooks being sold for $10 in Asia when it's $200 in the USA.
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This is also problematic in a digital store. Imagine someone from USA coming to Asia to buy a book, and they refuse to sell it, or require to charge more based on the citizenship and so on. It sounds ridiculous, but that's what happens in digital now both with regional pricing, and geoblocking. In short, applying physical geo based logic in the digital space can lead to unethical and ugly results, because of its non physical nature.