What is the point of geo-restriction? - eviltoast

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?

  • SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Many sites have little (real/legitimate) traffic outside of their country. Traffic from most countries also generates a lot less ad revenue per user than US or other “rich country” traffic. That means the sites have a limited motivation to allow access from other countries.

    At the same time, allowing traffic from other countries may force them to deal with a lot of spam/hacking/DDoS/scraping/bot and general garbage traffic, and complying with foreign privacy laws like GDPR.

    This makes it easier to just block the traffic.

    This is particularly infuriating when it’s a government web site and you’re a citizen abroad trying to access an essential government service. (In those cases it’s mostly done to avoid malicious traffic.)

    US news sites often do it because they get little non-US traffic and their sites are absolutely infested with ads and trackers that they can’t make GDPR compliant with any reasonable amount of effort.