• Beryl@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    That there are such wild variations in price between countries shows how little that subscription is correlated to any actual costs.

    At best subscribers in richest countries are subsidizing poorer ones, but most probably, Google is just trying to maximize the amount of money they can extract from everyone’s pocket. The repeated seemingly random price hikes seem to confirm this hypothesis. It’s just the MBAs enforcing terminal stage capitalism and ruining everything that is good.

    • darreninthenet@lemmy.sdf.org
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      4 months ago

      Not approving of any corporate behaviours here, but extracting the maximum price a market will bear has been the basis of pricing and supply/demand since such concepts existed which is at least 250 years.

      • Beryl@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I don’t disagree but it seems to me it’s going crescendo, with de facto monopolies running the show and buying anything that could be an obstacle, be it other companies or policymakers.

        • NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          So if it makes sense to charge people in India 1/4 the people in the US why can’t we pretend we are in India? People travel to other continents for healthcare.

          • darreninthenet@lemmy.sdf.org
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            4 months ago

            I suppose the argument would be, yes that’s fine as long as you only use it in India…? 🤷🏻‍♂️

            Again, not saying I agree but it’s hard to make a comparison like that I think.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      4 months ago

      Yeah, there’s no real costs, because in this case it’s a cost of “lost opportunity” in advertising.

      As a rich westerner, your eyeballs are worth more than some rickshaw driver in deepest darkest India, because you have more money to fritter away on nonsense.

      Never understood how the third world pricing logic holds up for things like video games, since the hardware to play them costs pretty much the same no matter where you are.

      • demonsword@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Never understood how the third world pricing logic holds up for things like video games, since the hardware to play them costs pretty much the same no matter where you are.

        logistics and taxes also play a role