Facebook gouging Australian customers for purchases as well
In an effort to find more ways to monetize the site, Facebook recently introduced the ability to pay for a story to be highlighted in your friends news feeds. I'm not too sure why you would want to pay for this feature, however the merits of the highlight system isn't in question here. The price between users globally is.
In the USA, this fee is $2 USD per post you want to highlight. I just happened to notice a highlight button when I posted some photos recently and checked it out. I was stunned to notice that Australians are forced to pay $7.70 AUD for the privilege!
While the Australian dollar has recently dipped below parity compared to the US dollar, $1 AUD currently equals $0.97 USD. According to Facebook however, one Australian dollar should be the equivalent of $0.26 USD.
Australians have been, and continue to be, on the wrong end of product cost conversion for years but it has recently come to light just how much we are getting ripped off; particularly for digital goods.
ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com.au/australians-to-pay-more-for-adobe-cs6-339336463.htm) uncovered one of the worst offenders, Adobe, and discovered Australians pay up to $1350 more than our US counterparts for the CS6 Master Collection; $3929 AUD compared to $2599 USD. This would still value the AUD higher than Facebook does at $0.66 USD.
There really is no genuinely good reason for this practice. Maybe iTunes has some reason for their price differences because of the different agreements they would have with local music companies, but there is no cost difference for Adobe and Facebook to provide these services and products to customers here compared to the US. The hope of the internet economy was to remove the regional differences, not exaggerate them.