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Amazon Mechanical Turn only accepts "requestors" people who pay for work, from the US. Why do they not want my money? Why does it matter. Actually it would make more sense to restrict where the workers are because of possible labour law problems, but workers can be from anywhere.
The funny thing is that they will ship a lot of physical goods anywhere in the world, and that means taking on lots of complexity and risk.
Google Adsense for mobile is only available if your address is in certain countries. They do not care where your audience are, only where you are.
MS and Yahoo, have ad networks that require you to be in the US (they may have added some other countries now).
Neither Adsense nor Amazon will make payments to a bank account except in the country your address is in. Why? Lots of people live outside their home country (10% of British citizens live elsewhere) but keep their finances at home. Again, there might be some cases (mainly people living in the US) where there might be legal reasons for this, but in most cases there are not.
Adsense also only pays through Western Union in certain countries. Why? WU operates everywhere.
it would not be a lot of effort, why not do it?
The whole payment issue is probably to do with the relationship with local tax authorities and the additional book keeping involved with double taxation relief.
With all the controversy in the last ten years over overseas tax shelters, money laundering, funding of terrorism, and so forth, are you really surprised that companies are conservative about where they will do electronic financial transactions? If you are a citizen of country X, reside in country Y and have a bank account in country Z, Google or Amazon are at risk in at least three different jurisdictions if anything goes wrong.
Yet you have 3 accounts, 3 times to do the settings, 3 times a system that is capabl eof doing direct deposit, but only in a given country (while the EU banking system is harmonized to work all over the same identical way, they revert to medieval cheques
Worst of it all the backends of .co.uk: english, the backend of .de: German, the backen of the .fr in French.
Not really a problem as they are virtually identical if you speak a bit of one of them, but why not let use choose 3 major European languages for the backend and have a single back-end work for all frontends ?
My opinion on why they do it like this: they are lazy and incapable of thinking big, which is really a pity.
What they are doing is just like they would have a amazon.ca.us, a amazon.az.us, etc. And then have affiliates in the .ca.us have a back-end in Spanish and those in .az.us a back-end in Navajo. All would be able to get paid would be a check if you live in the same state. Out of state, they'd deliver it cash via a courier just to annoy you.
And of course you earnings and revenue get spit up between the different frontends into diffferent backend so you can;t have a decent overview.
Sounds like nonesense? Agree, yet that's exactly the equivalent of what they are doing in the EU.
And then I've not talked about amazon.co.jp: I can;t even read anything they have. Sure I can sign-up using their forms (reading the source, the html is readable :-), but after that you get emails from them in Japanese: game over for me. Yet I do have quite some visitors from there who are intersted in my niche and who buy stuff, but it won;t be through being an affiliate as they make it impossible.
Same with Mechanical Turk: there is much less legal risk in accepting requestors than works, or in shipping physical goods.
A good many legal issues (not all, but many) can be avoided through contracts that specify jurisdiction.
Finally, lots of companies with much more legally complex businesses deal with people globally: banks, stockbrokers, money transfer services, web hosting companies, telecoms companies....
And then I've not talked about amazon.co.jp: I can;t even read anything they have.
Yes. The attempt by some online companies to assume your preferred language of communication on the basis of your geographical location is intensely annoying. It really can't be emphasised enough that where someone is in the world may have no relation to their language of operations.
It really can't be emphasised enough that where someone is in the world may have no relation to their language of operations.Agreed, but that is only ever going to be a tiny minority so they are going to have to accept the economic fact that large companies have to gear their operations to the majority. It is only local government who are daft enough to try and cater for everyone.
only ever
Only ever? Not at all: the trend is rising exponentially.
The collapse of the Second World, the ongoing development of the Third and the ever-closer integration of the First (see NAFTA, EU, G8), the economic rise of the Asian Tigers and the Gulf States, the rise of 21st century English to become the equivalent of 4th century Latin (or 8th century Arabic), the spread of multi-national corporations etc. means more people than ever are living and working in societies where their mother tongue is not the majority language of that society.
I have flown on some flag-carriers which recognise this growing reality on their booking websites. When you first access the site they include two drop-down menus - the first asks where you are based and the second what language you prefer to read the website in.
There is no assumption, for instance, that just because you live and work in Iran or Hungary your preferred language of communication is Farsi or Magyar.
