Comment by Helmut10001
3 days ago
This is somewhat counterintuitive: The US is the only country I know where most newspapers and government services use strict geoblocks to prevent me from accessing US sites in Europe. Conversely, I've never had any problems accessing European sites from the US. I know this is for a different set of reasons (likely GDPR cookie law or similar), but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.
And imgur has geoblocked the UK, which is extremely annoying as it was the reddit image host of choice.
It's going to be a weird set of content on this website. Are they going to livestream La Liga sports?
This. I regularly face geo blocks from American websites. Like literally at least once a week. It's very common for whatever reason for smaller US shops, newspapers any size and other random sites.
The geoblocks happened because of our (EU) governments making punitive rules of the website doesn't follow European standards. It's easier for an American website targeted at Americans to just not bother with Europeans.
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Only EU site I had a problem accessing that i can remember was from my electricity provider. Strangely enough they didn’t geoblock me but login threw an error because my local time didn’t match the local (German) timezone.
I changed my system timezone to Germany and it worked without issues, so I was wondering if it’s a very bad geoblock or something else entirely
That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal with that.
It makes sense to me. They're blocked in Europe because of European government polices, not American ones.
Maybe there's some sort of legal immunity the US government could grant to domestic sites which would allow them to lift those blocks without fear of reprisal?
> but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.
The search AIs tell me it's around a third of people.
The EU has problems reaching non-US sites. RT for example. The block isn't on RT or Russia's side.
Which US newspapers and which governments websites?
I happen to write this from Poland and I don't recall a single newspaper being geo blocked here. Not nyt, not washington post not anything I've ever accessed.
And didn't see US gov website geo blocked either.
So I ask again: which newspapers and which gov websites?
I don't browse US newspapers that often, but I regularly observe blocked ones, particularly smaller ones. Non-deterministic, e.g.: New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Dallas Morning News, Virginian-Pilot. Beyond that, a lot of CA and San Francisco Government and local utility services are geo-restricted (which I think, from a security standpoint, makes at least somewhat sense..).
Btw. asking once is enough ^^
Nexstar's stations blocked access from European IPs, providing a 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons response code; Nexstar are the largest TV station owner in the US, so a large number of sites for local affiliates were unavailable. I think other networks (Sinclair) may have also one so.
Here's a HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27854663
(I worked with Nexstar and experienced this directly. Looks like this may have changed recently.)
https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/GDPR%2...
That's a good start (might not be 100% up-to-date, but vast majority of them are still 451 blocked).