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Comment by creer | Hacker News Reader

The article is refreshing in its research and writing: the research is crude, testing just a very few alternatives - just enough for something to write about. And that's okay, this is not a scientific paper. And then the author collects a few quotes and does not dilute things too much. Good job.

I propose another workaround alternative that doesn't exist yet. A "multi-browser" which lets you browse and visually diff the web from different points of view. See the web from deep china, europe, Kansas City, San Francisco, Chrome, Firefox, daytime and nighttime, incognito, logged-in, etc all at once (modulo some time spreading for opsec or something) so we can get back to peace and what matters: booking a bloody hotel room or reading a magazine article without making a project of it.

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That exists, it's called "Linkensphere" and more generally an antidetect browser. They even have a marketplace for browser fingerprint profiles which include language, timezone, user agent, etc. But they're often used to look like real Americans to avoid fraud detection systems.

It's interesting that the name Linken Sphere comes from the DotA game. It's a piece of equipment that when equipped blocks one harmful spell from hitting your character. The analogy seems fit the anti-tracking as well, by preventing you from being tracked.

Location based price discrimination has it's own affectionate nickname here, the 'Australia tax'.

When I travel it is often cheaper (hundreds of dollar cheaper, even after currency conversion) to book parts of a trip from a UK or US based device, than from an Australian one, directly through the airline or hotels website. Same for digital goods -even for services that do not have a business or support presence locally ie no local overheads, we still get charged a premium.

I’ve done that from the US as well. Book the ticket from the destination country’s website (google translate is perfectly fine, typically) and pay in the local currency using my no-fx-fee credit card.

Back before Creative Cloud was a subscription, to get Creative Suite in Australia, it was cheaper to book a flight to America, a hotel for three nights, buy Creative Suite there, and a flight home, than to just pay the markup Adobe gave us as punishment for being Australian.

Hah! Fond memories of getting my first macbook air. At the time cheaper to fly to NYC and pick it up from the Apple Store (with the Edu discount of course) than to buy it in Ireland.

Sometimes there are costs associated with operating within a particular country that a company might want to pass on to those particular customers. For example business insurance in the US can be pretty high in some sectors, or cost of compliance with some piece of legislation unique to that country.

It seems fairly reasonable to me to pass those costs on, though of course it can be hard to tell whether that is happening or whether you're just getting gouged.

I am talking about products and services where there is no local footprint, particularly digital goods.

The poster child for this was Adobe Creative Suite, which at one point in the 2010's, you were able to buy a return flight from sydney to LA, purchase the software, and fly home for less than it cost to buy domestically after exchange rates. They were hauled before a Senate committee and refused to give any answers.

https://delimiter.com.au/2013/02/14/farce-adobe-ceo-flatly-r...

> I am talking about products and services where there is no local footprint, particularly digital goods.

Im not going to defend Adboe's undefendable pricing, but there's almost always some sort of cost associated with selling anything in most markets. For example if you sell to EU customers you'll likely have some obligations under GDPR, and in a lot of jurisdictions you'll need to pay some sort of sales tax after you hit a certain sales threshold. These things add complexity to your business and cost real money to administer.

Some businesses will decide they just don't want to operate in those markets, which is a fair call. Some might decide to spread the costs across their entire customer base. Some may choose to charge more in certain markets to cover the associated costs.

I understand this is only a nitpick, but I'd point out that if you've spent any time in "deep china" you'll realize that there isn't connection to much of anything beyond the firewall. Even if you're in a western hotel, you will be hard pressed to connect to anything other than your in-country company VPN. Having a foreign phone helps a bit too with mobile data. The great firewall treats cloudflare, GCP, AWS and many other ip ranges as damage to be "routed around". Azure is a bit better, presumably because many computers still have to do windows update regularly.

You can usually find a couple of VPNs that work though. And even find a few holes to download the VPN software through. I was even able to watch YouTube during my last trip (one.....frame....at.....a......time....).

Though it's difficult for non-citizens to get many services, since ID seems to be required for everything from getting a phone to riding a train. Most places also don't take cash, so you have to have a working phone and one of the payment apps.

The exit nodes are outside of China though, no? So the web content doesn't look like from "deep China".

I don't know what deep china is supposed to mean but back in 2018, my colleagues in Shenzhen and Beijing didn't have any trouble connecting to an Indian WireGuard VPN server.

I don't really know either. Deep China to me means anything other than the coastal Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen megacites full of foreigners. Anything interior with less than 20M people, but still 5-15M like Hefei, Wuhan, Xi'an, Chengdu, Chongqing. Tiny cities like Ordos 2M? or even coastal cities like Fuzhou 8M? are even more challenging.

"Darkest Peru" is where Paddington Bear was born. I meant China at its most remote free of foreign, or western visitors, your pick. So as to be the most free of web traffic western expectation and consequently consideration.

Which is very interesting for China because we can marvel at the still large size and number of cities which see few foreign visitors. Leading to "tiny cities like Ordos 2M". Or what? dozens like that? Hundreds? And considering the size of the China "full of foreigners", that's an equivalently "authentic" China.

Anyway, Peru is fine if you prefer.

I still wanted to see what the price was for each test. Maybe the author didn't want to say which hotels IRL, so call them Hotels A-E.

have been booking 3 weeks last fall for a road trip exclusively with "Booking". The more I booked, the higher the discounts became, going from 15% to a staggering 30% off. When sharing the location with my partner (via verbal communication and without us being on the same network) they got an even lower price for the same spot without her having gone through the same booking history (or barely any booking history).

Booking is not listening through your microphone, if that's what you're implying. Else, what is it that you're implying?

I'm not implying anything.

My point is pretty simple: Booking is offering a discount that only exists in the users head because they trust that after N purchases in a row this qualified them for getting an even better rate. But Booking can't really offer these things because they have already squeezed out the limit from the accommodation.

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