Australians are cheaper to fly to the United States to buy software

Simple math:
The cost of Adobe Creative Suite Master 6 in Australia: $ 4,334
The cost of Adobe Creative Suite Master 6 in the United States: $ 2,599 Flight
ticket from Sydney to Los Angeles and back: $ 1,147.58 (Virgin Australia)

Flight to the States will save a simple Australian designer approximately 587 dollars. The Australian programmer who will fly to the USA to buy Visual Studio will save even more.

On February 11, the Australian Parliamentary Committee sent subpoenas to Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft. Representatives of the three companies are required to appear on March 22 at 9:30 am to testify at a hearing on software pricing in Australia in response to complaints from Choice and ACMA.

Software and other digital content are very different in cost in different countries. Since the cost of creating a new copy is close to zero, the retail price is determined for marketing reasons. In a poor country, prices are lower, in a rich - higher.

Australia is not the luckiest of all. Almost all digital content is much more expensive than in Europe and the United States. According to the Choice consumer protection society, prices for software in Australia are on average 34% higher than in the US, for music in iTunes - 51% higher, for Wii games - 88%, for computer components - 41% . Probably, the main logic of the high price is that the Australians have nowhere to go, they will not fly to another continent for shopping (although see the mathematical example above).

Human rights activists got to the point of publishingofficial recommendations for Australian consumers with the advice to fake IP addresses and credentials in Internet services. When visiting online stores, the consumer protection society recommends using virtual private networks (VPNs) and alternative DNS servers like Unblock Us to show the store an American IP address. When ordering digital goods - indicate the place of residence in the United States. In the iTunes store you need to have an American account.

In October 2012, Choice also filed a request to the Australian Parliament with a request to deal with international discrimination by large corporations. Now it came to the hearing. Representatives of Adobe, Apple and Microsoft will talk about the causes of the “Australian tax” on March 22.