AWS suddenly changed all of my aws accounts (I manage several) from USD to CAD. This change was made without any warning.<p>I receved my usual monthly email: "Amazon Web Services Billing Statement Available / Relevé de facture Amazon Web Services disponible", which indicated that the payment would be processed in CAD, with an asteriks indicating: "* You have asked for this invoice to be processed in CAD. For more information visit https://aws.amazon.com/billing/faqs/#payment_currency"<p>When I log into my AWS account to change my default current back to USD, I am not able to. My only payment option in the dropdown list is CAD.
This happened to me as well, I have a ticket out from a week ago.<p>You cant change to USD because AWS canada doesnt support USD for credit cards. And you cant change to AWS Inc (usa) because when you try to remove your canadian billing address it says AWS Inc doesnt support CAD.
If you have a billing address in country X and country X mandates that all invoices paid by customers in country X must have certain taxes applied and remitted, AWS will set up a subsidiary in that country, bill in the locally currency, and remit taxes.
Wonder if this has anything to do with Canada tightening its control of their citizens' banks accounts and money flows between the US, etc. which was, of course, done under the excuse of "dangerous" trucker protests.<p>The promise of the internet allowing the free flow of information and knowledge has been crushed in the last decade as the tech monopolies have consolidated their control and happily work with local governments to ensure their own citizens are monitored and limited to only "approved" content - can't have nasty disinformation spreading, of course.<p>But even more insidious is the way that capital is still able to traverse the globe without issue - their corporate headquarters are moved to PO Boxes in tax shelters like the Caymans and Cyprus, they take advantage of wage and currency arbitrage by easily importing endless waves of lower waged workers from the developing world while simultaneously moving their manufacturing and service jobs the other way, while gobbling up resources and real estate at opportune times of currency fluctuations.<p>Meanwhile, the average pleb can't even take advantage of the same currency and wage arbitrage e.g. buying a digital movie or game or cloud services from another jurisdiction over a VPN. Or living overseas in a country with a lower cost of living (thus being able to purchase a home, start a family, etc) while working remotely for a company at 1st world salary.