Because it isn’t a “switch.”
It would be moving the character files, along with possible regional differences (possibly involving some manual editing), from one set of region character servers to the other.
The basic reasons are:
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They actually set it up to not work.
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They don’t seem to want to do it.
It would obviously be a super premium price, if they even WANTED to do it. You’d probably be looking at a minimum of $200. But again, they don’t seem to want to do it.
As far as I know, Squaresoft/whomever runs the servers/games in those other regions as well. Wow isn’t set up that way, it is contracted out to someone in that other area (in a way.)
This is why it wasn’t native to Australia, for a long time (I thought it still wasn’t, but I was looking at old information.) They could not reach a deal with the Internet monopoly company, in Australia back then. This has since changed.
But that is because they WERE here; So you are arguing against yourself, basically. Australia used to have to play on servers over here, with a horrible ping. Eventually, some deal was finally struck there and it could go native. So they had to be moved from here, to there. Because of that, with however they set it up, they can still move (since they had to in the first place.)
Q: Where will the servers be physically located?
A: The game servers will be hosted within an Australian data centre, ensuring Australian and New Zealand players receive the best possible latency.
Q: Will I still be able to play with my friends who are on U.S. servers?
A: Yes! Because the new Australian World of Warcraft game servers will continue to communicate with the existing North American hardware, players will still be able to play with friends on U.S game servers, just as they can today. They’ll still be able to use their Blizzard friends list to easily group up and chat, regardless of where they are playing.
So because they were HERE, it is still “connected.” So it was not set up the same way as other region’s servers.
So it seems to me more like it is just “hosted” in Australia, but ran/connected to here still. They can even play with their old buddies, who are on regular US server connections. This is different from the other world “regions”, where the game is basically “ran there.” EU and such even have different forums, with different forum blues.
Yes, it would have been great if they HAD set it up that way originally in those other areas.