CANBERRA: With prices higher in Australia than the US, many think we’re already paying an Australia tax, but Choice says website blocking could make things much worse. Consumer advocates Choice say a ‘proposed law for website blocking could stop Australians accessing better deals through international stores.’
This new law is being considered by Ausrtalia’s Federal Senate, and alarmingly, it could be used to block VPNs or virtual private networks! VPNs allow people to connect to the Internet as if they were in a different location to the one they’re in, such as letting Australians look like they’re in the US, UK, Europe, Asia or somewhere else.
People use VPNs to access geo-blocked content, or to shop at stores offering cheaper prices than domestically available, which might also be geo-blocked.Of course, if a store won’t ship internationally that’s a different problem, but there are delivery services to get around that issue, although Choice doesn’t mention that because it’s not a focus of its media release.
Choice is focusing on the revelation from Wikileaks today that ‘Sony has been lobbying Netflix to prevent users from navigating to its international sites to access content.’This of course puts meat on the bones of fears expressed earlier this year that Netflix would start blocking VPN access to its content, as reported in iTWire at the time.
