Geo-blocking, geoblocking or geolocking is technology that restricts access to Internet content based upon the user's geographical location. In a geo-blocking scheme, the user's location is determined using Internet geolocation techniques, such as checking the user's IP address against a blacklist or whitelist, GPS queries in the case of a mobile device, accounts, and measuring the end-to-end delay of a network connection to estimate the physical location of the user. The result of this check is used to determine whether the system will approve or deny access to the website or to particular content. The geolocation may also be used to modify the content provided: for example, the currency in which goods are quoted, the price or the range of goods that are available. The term is most commonly associated with its use to restrict access to premium multimedia content on the Internet, such as films and television shows, primarily for copyright and licensing reasons. There are other uses for geo-blocking, such as blocking malicious traffic or to enforce price discrimination, location-aware authentication, fraud prevention, and online gambling (where gambling laws vary by region). Websites also use geo-blocking to comply with sanctions rules and regulations.
Justification The ownership of exclusive territorial rights to audiovisual works may differ between regions, requiring the providers of the content to disallow access for users outside of their designated region; for example, although an online service, HBO Now is only available to residents of the United States, and cannot be offered in other countries because its parent network HBO had already licensed exclusive rights to its programming to different broadcasters (such as in Canada, where HBO licensed its back-catalogue to Bell Media), who may offer their own, similar service specific to their own region and business model (such as Crave). For similar reasons, the library of content available on subscription video on demand services such as Netflix may also vary between regions, or the service may not even be available in the user's country at all. Geo-blocking can be used for other purposes as well. Price discrimination by online stores can be enforced by geo-blocking, forcing users to buy products online from a foreign version of a site where prices may be unnecessarily higher than those of their domestic version (although the inverse is often the case). The "Australia Tax" has been cited as an example of this phenomenon, which has led to governmental pressure to restrict how geo-blocking can be used in this manner in the country. Other noted uses include blocking access from countries that a particular website is not relevant to (especially if the majority of traffic from that country is malicious), and voluntarily blocking access to content or services that are illegal under local laws. This can include online gambling, and various international websites blocking access to users within the European Economic Area due to concerns of liability under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Circumvention Geo-blocking can be circumvented. When IP address-based geo-blocking is employed, virtual private network (VPN) and anonymizer services can be used to evade geo-blocks. A user can, for example, access a website using a U.S. IP address in order to access content or services that are not available from outside the country. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and BBC iPlayer are among the foreign video services widely used through these means by foreign users. Its popularity among VPN users in the country prompted Netflix to officially establish an Australian version of its service in 2014. In response to complaints over the quality of domestic coverage by NBC, along with a requirement for viewers be a subscriber to a participating pay television provider in order to access the online content, a large number of American viewers used VPN services to stream foreign online coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympics and 2014 Winter Olympics from British and Canadian broadcasters. Unlike NBC's coverage, this foreign coverage only used a geo-block and did not require a TV subscription. In 2009, Venezuela subsidized the launch of the communications satellite Venesat-1, in part to amplify Telesur's programming by enabling it to avoid geo-blocking efforts by DirectTV, an American company. In 2013, the New Zealand internet service provider Slingshot introduced a similar feature known as "global mode"; initially intended for travellers to enable access to local websites blocked in New Zealand, the service was re-launched in July 2014 as a feature to all Slingshot subscribers. The consumer-focused re-launch focused on its ability to provide access to U.S. online video services. Unlike manually-configured VPN services, Global Mode was implemented passively at the ISP level and was automatically activated based on a whitelist, without any further user intervention.
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