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I learnt about Price discrimination at college, a practice of basically charging different prices to people depending on their ability to pay. It was simply a tool to maximise profits and companies did it when they can. The usual was to differentiate was by geography – so you’d charge one price for your furniture in a posh suburb of London and then slash the prices in a less affluent district of Liverpool for instance. The markets could be kept pretty much separate and profits would be increased.

Bigger companies changed a lot of that by standardizing prices a lot, but you’ll still often pay more for your burger in certain spots in London than anywhere else using the big chains. The Internet initially made this a bit more difficult, after all why buy from Amazon UK when Amazon France could deliver for 2/3 of the price.

Then entered the annoying technology of Geotargeting, which simply looks up your IP address and decides what you can or can’t see. It will route you through to the appropriate Napster site, or block you from watching BBC Iplayer abroad or Hulu from outside the States.