People in Greece Can No Longer Pay for International Cloud Services

Remember yesterday when I wrote about Chicago adding an Amusement Tax to cloud-based streaming services like Netflix? And remember how I quoted a few sources that were all “unfair!” and “how will this even work?”

Well, Greece is currently learning exactly how something like this might work. As BuzzFeed reports:

Last weekend, Greece’s government imposed capital controls — restrictions on the ability to take money out of the country — due to an economic crisis that continues to deepen after the country failed to make a debt repayment to the International Monetary Fund. The restrictions were an attempt to ensure cash remains within Greece’s economy and is not simply moved to a foreign safe haven.

However, the move has also had the effect of stopping many payments made using Greek credit cards to online services based outside the country. As a result, ordinary Greeks who are accustomed to using international services such as Apple’s AppStore and PayPal are now finding that they can no longer use popular paid-for internet services due to the financial restrictions.

These restrictions include PayPal, Dropbox, even online subscriptions to newspapers and magazines. (As Manjula Martin told us last week, paywalls aren’t that great for magazines or their readers — and this is just one more reason why.)

It is strange that people are still thinking of the cloud as some amorphous thing that should belong to everybody. The cloud is made of servers located in specific places (many, many specific places) individually managed by various companies that are also located in specific places — Dropbox, for example, is headquartered in San Francisco — and includes objects of value that are sent to specific places, the same way they used to pack DVDs into boxes and ship them to Blockbuster.

And if you bought a DVD at a Blockbuster in Oregon, there wouldn’t be any sales tax, but if you bought it in Washington, there would be sales tax — and now if you pay to stream that same movie in Chicago, you pay Amusement Tax, and if you’re in Greece, you can’t buy the soundtrack on iTunes because of capital controls.

It makes sense, and as much as my heart is chanting “information wants to be free!” I agree with it.

What about you?

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