Some websites are available only from US. Or some streaming service allows certain content only from US.
Why does such geo restriction exist? What is the benefit for the company to implement this?
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Europa is a Jupiter moon. Did you mean Europe?
I’m sure he meant Europa. Quentin Tarantino flicks are popular there.
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It’s only Europa if you are talking in German. Same applies to other languages (including mine). But in English context it’s Europe.
This evolved into a lot more than i should of have. All I meant with my original comement was to lighty nudge the user to correct the spelling without making a big deal out of it by making it educational at the the same time.
legal reasons or media manipulation reasons
On top of all the legit reasons here my former, itsy bitsy company geo blocked everything not US/Canada because our customer base was entirely US based and that wasn’t changing. The only traffic we got from overseas ips was looking for vulnerabilities. So why not just block it.
Very often the copyright holders of the content have different distribution arrangements for different countries/regions. If you can get the content from some other region, then your local content provider isn’t getting whatever fees/and revenue they would get from you.
If the website is selling physical goods it could be to prevent having to export. That can be anything from having to deal with different laws to just plain old more work with customs and everything.
Yes, like to ship to the new UK we are supposed to register with a UK government agency, collect the customs on each shipment, and pay it to the UK government monthly/quarterly. Or…we can just not ship to the UK which is a lot easier.
Licensing.
Another reason could be for test market. For example, some products launch into smaller places as a test bed to see if they will be successful at a larger scale. Some websites and services start this way as well.
Traditionally, it’s been about money.
More recently, with the introduction of the EU’s laws on cookies, it’s been about compliance. A website in the US might not wish to comply with the EU cookie laws, and elect to keep its articles geoblocked outside of the US.
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I hit a lot of American sites that want to process my data in a malicious way that would be illegal.
Rather than fix the issue, the side just redicts to a “we’re sorry to our European friends” - like fuck off, it’s been years you cunts.
Anyway, to answer your question - it protects them from legal liability.
Sometimes it’s because of certain laws from the EU for example that they don’t want to follow like the GDPR for example. Other times it’s because of licensing in case of streaming services.
This is a big one. It’s a lot of work to implement GDPR and sometimes it’s easier to disallow traffic from Europe than to re-architect your back end to keep European data on European servers, allow for users to request data deletion, etc.
I imagine it probably has some IP law purposes.
I think the reason might be related to the cost. For example, ChatGPT may not be available in Iran because in order for them to use ChatGPT, OpenAI would have to implement a server in Iran’s network, which could be costly. If only 1% of the total population in Iran would pay for GPT-4, it would be impossible to make any profit.
