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?
Europe was named after the Greek Phoenician princess Europa, same as the planet was. Also a lot of languages call the continent Europa. You could almost consider it to be the more accurate name.
That just depends on the language you speak. In Dutch Europe is actually called Europa.
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.
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.
