Imagine trying to buy a song on iTunes , but find your citation card payment blocked . You ca n’t pay up your cloud store subscription , either , even though you have the money . Apple just wo n’t accept your card , and you ’re about to miss most of your files .
That ’s the situation many people in Greece are waking up to this calendar week in the backwash of the land ’s new working capital control jurisprudence . Technically , Greek lawmaker pass the majuscule control practice of law to stop people from evacuating all their money to overseas bank accounts and draining cash fromthe country ’s struggling economy , but the law also prevent casual consumer from making even the little credit payments to extraneous ship’s company , admit Apple , PayPal , and other staples of online life story .
Someone Is Trying to Crowdfund a Greek Bailout Because Why Not
Most Greek customers have the money , but religious service supplier ca n’t legally accept their payment , so they can only look out impotently as their cloud storage subscriptions expire . So far , Apple has n’t said whether it will cut Greek iCloud user any slack water . Boomberg Newssaid it ’s Athens - based staff had already received a notice that their 20 GB iCloud subscription would be cut to 5 GB because their monthly defrayal could n’t go through .
“ It ’s just that no one who created these services foresaw a world where develop countries would have restrictions on the habit of credit cards for foreign payments,”wrote BuzzFeed News UK deputy editor Jim Waterson . The online economy is international , and most of its participant take that for grant – until the organization grate to a check as it has in Greece , leaving both consumer and service providers at a loss .
And the capital controller laws are n’t just bruise online payments . The substructure that processes payments at checkout terminal in brick - and - trench mortar store is also essentially outside , so Greek citizen travel overseas could ordinarily use their credit add-in at payment end anywhere . But on the spur of the moment , they ca n’t , which means that travelling outside of Greece is reasonably much out of the doubt .
It ’s not clear what the economic impact of Greece ’s capital control laws will be , but the intermediate Greek consumer is in for a nerve-racking clock time .
[ Bloomberg , Buzzfeed ]
Top image : Wikimedia Commons
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