[matt4077]

> Oettinger at least - perhaps the fact he now left the Digital Economy and Society position helps).

It certainly has lowered my blood pressure–he's now in a much more important position. But that means that people will actually stop him if he continues to embarrass himself in the way he previously did.

There'll be exceptions for sports broadcasts, and maybe other content where there is a reason legitimising a difference in prices. For example: a french 24h news channel may be worth 20 Euro in France, but is more of an "yeah, all right, why not" buy for someone in Austria trying to freshen up his language skills.

[tripzilch]

Funny how "let the market decide the price" is suddenly a much less attractive option when it means making way less money.

Are French newspapers also suddenly a lot cheaper when sold in Austria? Of course not. They're more expensive in fact, because of transport and the cost of stocking a relatively unpopular item.

Now, these two costs don't matter for digital/streaming media. So imagine that they are negligible for French newspapers, too. Would they be sold in Austria for super-cheap, with just a slim margin on the price of paper they're printed on? I kind of expect the price to be roughly the same, actually.

The only reason that digital/streaming media get to pretend to be "different" is because they started out with the technological means to enforce market segmentation before regulation got wind of it. And that ability is incredibly profitable, to the detriment of the consumer. Which is why we regulate it. And now they don't want to give back something they really didn't have any right to in the first place.

Note that I'm not claiming either side of whether these streaming media should be the expensive local price everywhere, or the cheap everywhere-else price. Just that the fact that the market value of something differs extremely between regions, is an argument for regulation of market segmentation, not against.