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Comment by Corinthian | Hacker News Reader

Netflix, like countless other online services, is not built for global citizens - people that work in different countries to their own.

I am a British born expat, living in Qatar, so of course I want to watch the UK orientated Netflix programming and not the Arabic or Hindi. I have a UK TV license but of course, I can't watch UK TV from Qatar. Trying to pay for things online is frequently a nightmare as many companies won't take payment from a UK card unless it's from a UK IP. Same trying to pay tax on my US houses, also some websites don't even let you connect to them unless you use a US IP address! Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in, that's fine, but even they don't provide a simple way to change the language to English! Similar with Spotify, same with Apple music. Whatsapp voice calls are blocked in Qatar.

All of these problems and many more are bypassed with a good VPN. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin. If VPN's are clamped down on it's going to make life difficult for tens of millions of people. VPN's are actually VITAL in many situations.

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Forget country of origin. It seems that most websites don't even acknowledge the existence of multilingual countries: You are in Switzerland, you must speak German; Belgium, here is some French; Canada, I guess that makes you Anglophone.

It reminds me of a comment on an article about one of the giants (Google perhaps) who did not correctly handle capitalization rules for Dutch last names and capitalized "van", etc. Someone said something along the lines of "it's the height of corporate arrogance when a company treats your entire country and identity as an edge case." How useful or convenient tech services are tends to correlate strongly with how close to SF Bay area your life is. A UK person in Qatar is way too far. Even a Francophone in North America seems to be too far for most services.

Until a couple of years ago, google's date picker for custom range search only worked if your locale was set to use the American date format. If your locale used any other other format, it would flip them around and give you a completely different time range. It always amused me how just a couple of clicks from their main product was a case they probably didn't even test for any non-US date formats, and cared so little about it that it took them years to fix it, despite bug reports. In that case, almost all of the non-US world was the edge case.

They do acknowledge multi lingual countries like India.

When they're big enough, sure.

But I've spent months of my life telling various US based employers all the ways their assumptions about languages were wrong, and it was often a weird level of blindness where they'd be aware of some exceptions but fail to realise the same pattern repeats lots of places.

You'd see companies with separate Spanish versions of their US services still struggle to deal with the existence of Switzerland, for example.

If you really want to blow their minds, show them websites of the Government of Spain, which have separate versions in Basque, Catalan (+ Valencian) and Galician as well as in Spanish.

And if you're multilingual within "monolingual" countries, especially the US, good luck. (microrant: there's no such thing as a monolingual country, and the US has no official language!)

I've gotten emails from multiple bigtechs -- dropbox was one IIRC -- that were half in German, half in English. Or more relevant to Netflix -- your language setting for content has to be the same as your language setting for the UI. I'm sure to some people these things seem like nitpicks, but that's exactly the problem: treating language as an afterthought is such a profoundly middle class white American view. The vast majority of the world works differently, and most tech firms simply don't care. This isn't something trivial. It's a core part of how people interact with the world.

> Or more relevant to Netflix -- your language setting for content has to be the same as your language setting for the UI.

Yeah, it sucks! How hard is it to have a general UI language setting and per-profile content language preferences? I usually set everything to English but that means my family can't use my Netflix.

> I've gotten emails from multiple bigtechs -- dropbox was one IIRC -- that were half in German, half in English.

There is one website I use that sends emails when a staff member takes an action on your account (an extremely common and expected behaviour, something that can happen multiple times a day).

The only problem is that these emails are localised to the language setting of the staff member who performed the action, not the language setting of the person actually receiving the email!

There are different kinds of multilingual. English-German, French-Spanish, Italian-Spanish, basically there is no problem when your languages are co-located. However, try leading a proper multilingual life if you are German-Russian. You couldn't buy a DVD or BluRay with both languages. With streaming, it gets a bit beter, Netflix is actually one of the better players in the market -- more often than not, they do have a Russian translation and subtitles both for their own productions as well as licensed stuff. Disney+ in Germany doesn't seem to have Russian at all, even though they obviously own Russian translations (NB: no streaming service has managed to offer multiple video tracks, i.e. with localized signs in animated films). Maybe this will change when they enter the Russian market (should be this autumn), but again: why does this have to matter to me, living in Germany? The list goes on and on: there is no Russian in Amazon, i.e. Alexa won't understand Russian and also won't understand the titles of any music tracks in Russian (or Japanese for that matter). There is an Alexa equivalent from Yandex called Alice, but you'll be right to guess that I can't just import it to Germany, since it requires geo-blocked russian services to function. It's infuriating, but I guess that's the price we pay for letting US drive the innovation.

Just give me a service where I can pay a €5 per video track, €1 per audio track and €0.50 for a subtitle track with a full catalog of movies and languages from the whole world. Then I can assemble my own Fight Club with English, German and Japanese dubs and Russian, Swedish and Swahili subs without having to resort to piracy.

Alisa (on Station Mini) works perfectly in Poland.

The going rate for bulk DVDs on Ebay is 36 American cents[1] a piece. My recommendation (and what I do) would be to set up a Plex server[2], buy 2000 DVDs, rip the DVDs to your server, and import any needed subs from online[3]. You can also upscale the DVDs to 720p quality using FFMPEG's implementation of the nnedi3 neural network AI[4] (example script[5]).

[1]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/332587500166?hash=item4d6fc28286:g:... [2]:https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/official-hp-290-p0043w-own... [3]:https://support.plex.tv/articles/200471133-adding-local-subt... [4]:https://github.com/dubhater/vapoursynth-nnedi3 [5]:https://github.com/frypatch/plex-media-optimizer

If you are downloading subtitles you are already committing piracy, so you might as well download the whole movie in better quality and with less hassle.

> If you are downloading subtitles you are already committing piracy

OpenSubtitles.org[1] claims that downloading amateur transcribed subs and translation-subs is fair use.

> so you might as well download the whole movie in better quality and with less hassle.

My experience is that most movies that are not extremely popular are either not available for torrent download or if they are the audio is not 5.1 surround sound (6 audio channels whose combined bitrate is 448kbps) and the video bitrate is restricted enough to be DVD quality anyways.

Specifically for the video, a 2GB 1080p h264 compressed video will have an average video bitrate less than 2mbps. Its widely acknowledged that h264 is not greater than twice as efficient as MPEG-2 so lets double that to say that a 2GB 1080p h264 compressed video's perceived bitrate quality is no more than 4mbps. Most commercial DVDs will be 480p MPEG-2 compressed video with a bitrate greater than 5mbps.

For perceived video quality (other than diagonal edges and text) bitrate, not resolution, is what matters. Using an neural network AI upscaler such as nnedi3 (or even something less intensive such as the spline algorithm) to pre-upscale 480p video to 720p video will greatly improve the diagonal edges.

Note: If you have 1080p sources that are larger than 2GB and have 5.1 surround sound then you are absolutely correct in saying that the movie will be better quality. I just have not seen those available for download anywhere for the vast majority of movies.

[1]: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/dmca

Sony PSN does show the 'van' in some places, and not in others. Apple, same story. Google, same story.

Sometimes when it is supported, they capitalize it. It's a mess.

People started to get a clue about this 5-10 years ago though. It used to be much worse. I recall having to deal with it daily and I don't think about it much any more - more like a weekly exception.

In fact, now also I get some places trying to be too helpful to the point of being confusing. For example, a trainer store that auto-detects location and lists prices in GBP but sizes in US (without indication) and doesn't actually have an EU/UK distribution centre. So whoops it's going to take ages to arrive, it gets re-listed in USD at the final checkout, whoops again, 3% charge from my credit card, and then the wrong size arrives. But at least I knew the rough GBP amount!

When is the last time you paid for a google service tho ? Its the height of millenial arrogance to think a compagny should give you a special treatment for free

Last time? About two months ago. Sidenote, I am not Dutch. Are you implying that Dutch people don't buy any services from Google?

Ok for you... I was mostly saying most people don't pay in general for google products and yet complain about google

In World of Warcraft, the Dutch word kunt gets censored because it is a variation of an English curseword. While in Dutch its a very basic word ('can' as in 'you can').

Customer Service rep. was aware of the issue but could not do anything about it.

They are going to use AI in the game more for such moderation, so I hold my breath.

Also, not sure what Spanish implies but Portuguese usually means Brazilian Portuguese. Dutch usually means Dutch, not Flemish, unless its a Belgian production.

In the chat or in-game storry telling and such?

Isn't 'cunt' also used much more casually in the UK and Australia?

Cursewords and women's nipples... has their devilish impact on society ever been proven or rather is there even any evidence whatsoever? Why do we accept this idiotic censorship again?

Likely people at these companies never grokked that Localization is both nation and language - they conflate the two. That's a sad level of stupid.

> How useful or convenient tech services are tends to correlate strongly with how close to SF Bay area your life is.

Exactly rule we've deduced with my wife in our trips in South-East Asia and out living in Russia.

Fun story:

In the middle of nowhere in Myanmar we'd stopped to eat in roadside shack (we'd travelled by motorcycle). Food was delicious, and my wife looked up Google Maps while we waited for ordered second dish. To our surprise, this shack was listed on GMaps. We wrote good review, why not? Google Map asks several additional questions, like «Is this place popular among the college crowd» and «Is this place wheelchair-accessible». Nearest college is about 500km to this place, 0.01% of children go to college, and wheelchairs, of course, could be pushed to this shack, as it has ground floor. I mean, no floor at all. It was very funny indeed.

But most of the time same service behavior is not funny, but irritating.

As an Indian, it's especially annoying when websites just assume that I want the website in Hindi. We have 22 languages officially recognised in the Constitution, and a few hundred regional dialects, and Hindi is only spoken by 40% of the population. A lower percentage even reads it. I'm good with English, thanks. It's what I think in.

For Google, you should type in Google.com/ncr . The NCR means no country redirect and you get standard google. I traveled a lot and learned this trick along the way. But your point is well made

I was totally unaware of that, thank you, have an uptick!

I learned this the other day because Google thinks I want google.co.hk when I access from my VPN IP address (which is in a New Jersey data center). I filled out their "wrong country" form and of course haven't heard back and don't expect to. The /ncr workaround means I have to go to google.com/ncr before searching instead of searching from the browser search bar - annoying!

you could right click ncr search bar to add it as search engine. All you have to do then is switch the default search engine.

How do I do this on iPhone/iPad?

Is there something like that as well to make the region match the preferred browser settings (in terms of language)?

"For Google, you should type in Google.com/ncr . The NCR means no country redirect ..."

Is there a similar trick that specifies I only want search results that contain the search terms I searched for ?

Probably too much to ask ...

You can put the phrase in quotes "" to identify you want that exact match, and I think you can do -phrase to remove results.

No and no.

You can put phrases in quotes and some of the initial results may rearrange themselves to reflect this intention that you've signaled but, overall, you'll still get many results that either contain different arrangements of those terms or don't contain them at all.

The minus sign has even hazier functionality and completely falls apart if you are searching --command-line options, etc.

It's not like this isn't a solved problem ... altavista had properly functioning (and complex) boolean operators that worked to give you very precise search results.

The reason you can't do that with google is that google doesn't want you to.

You are the product. Their goal is to generate revenue with ads and links to their paying customers on the results page. Giving you precise results works against this objective.

no you are an edge case the rest of the world ie non tech users prefer the way google understands the queries and answers them.

The word "prefers" implies that the choice was made after evaluating other options.

The word you should use is "accepts".

The rest of the world clicks on more ads this way. I believe that's their most important metric.

Google used to support all those things - quoted phrases, NOT, minus sign, etc. In fact, for a long time, unlike other search engines, using a + sign (for "must include this term") was unnecessary because every search term was interpreted that way implicitly.

Not only did google have the largest index, it also had the best search engine -- there's a reason they won on search. These days, they still have the largest index and the best crawler, but I'd argue they don't have the best query handler. At least DuckDuckGo takes what I say literally.

I remember 15-20 years ago when you could do complex searches with Google, and while it was great for power users, most regular users had issues with it, since searching "how do I replace a car wheel?" would search for that literal string, instead of parsing it to "how to replace a car wheel"

That said, maybe my memory is fuzzy and there was a time where Google search allowed rich queries and also did a good job at guessing users intentions.

About 10 years or so ago … google was ridiculously good. The web practically jumped out of the screen at you. It’s been piss poor for like the last 5 years or so though.

Someone else commented here in a past thread that the biggest cliff happened when Amit Singhal left Google and the AI lead John Giannandrea replaced him.

John Giannandrea brought about more AI heavy search and forced 'natural language' queries down the throat of everyone.

It obviously makes google money and is the right tool for popular queries. But for anyone doing more 'power user' searches it is just inept and I agree with GGP duckduckgo is now a better search engine for more complex queries.

Check out Google Dorks, it provides every option to essentially search and find many, many things.

I believe putting + signs before terms will require them to be present on the page.

Google got rid of that syntax about a decade ago, when they were trying to make Google Plus a thing. (As I recall, they wanted to reserve it for G+ usernames, like using @ for Twitter or Instagram.) I just checked and it looks like they still haven't brought it back.

They "new" syntax is to surround the desired term with double quotes. But of course quoting was already used for searching phrases, so autosuggestions stopped working for phrase searches. Progress!

It's easy to see why they wouldn't reintroduce power user tools once removed. It's sucky, but all mass-market tech is like this, constantly adapting to fit some lowest common denominator. Power users just aren't that.

Select Tools and then change from All Results to Verbatim. This should eliminate paraphrasing. Surround the query with double quotes if you don't want the words to be split on the page.

I wish that Google never removed the + operator because even if double quotes does something similar, it is not the same (thanks to Google Plus that I think doesn't even exist anymore).

What I find strange about this is that, given how Netflix accounts are all attached to a billing instrument, and how it is generally at least "very annoying" to get a bank account in a different country, it seems like Netflix should not care at all about VPN usage: they "should" just use the country from the billing address on your credit card to decide what content you have access to... it not only seems like it would be a lot less work for Netflix, but would also be a much tougher region wall to bypass. (And like, I do see the commentary about using a UK card with the wrong IP, but that's a different backing argument involving credit card fraud and clearly something you are already past due to how you have a Netflix account somehow.) I can only imagine that the underlying contracts with the content providers are "written stupid" in some way (in ways that are needlessly difficult to enforce), limiting the location of the viewer instead of the origin of the viewer. (FWIW: I am now seeing 7ewis mentioned this same idea in a different thread.)

Imagine that:

- Netflix has a smaller/worse selection in the UK, than in the US, and

- Netflix charges more in the UK than in the US, and

- A UK person could easily get access to Netflix US by getting a friend in the US (or a US-based ebay seller) to set up their Netflix account

It would be nearly impossible for Netflix to comply with their agreements with content owners.

Limiting content based on billing address is easier to bypass than your post suggests.

> A UK person could easily get access to Netflix US by getting a friend in the US (or a US-based ebay seller) to set up their Netflix account

This can't be any random stranger if the UK person will be using the US person's means of payments. Therefore, not 100% but it could work in most cases.

Exactly... this simply isn't easy to pull off, and is certainly nowhere near as easy to pull off as changing your IP address, and is going to have way fewer false positives (in addition to fewer false negatives) than attempting to whack-a-mole VPNs over time with nothing more than limiting the number of Netflix accounts a person can pay for with a single credit card (such as to "1"). I'm literally mostly known for running a worldwide market with tens of millions of users--Cydia--and I'm telling you: it isn't some trivial restriction to bypass if you require someone's billing instrument to be located in a specific country (and the fact that such restrictions work so well is a big reason why blockchain has been so revolutionary to so many sectors... but isn't really going to affect Netflix's billing any time soon).

They'd have to also block BIN ranges often used for virtual cards (e.g. those used by Brex, Wise, privacy.com) and ranges commonly used for prepaid cards. Otherwise it's still easy to bypass.

One thing which supports your view: Spotify uses card billing address, and has large international pricing differences, but I don't hear much about people bypassing it by getting someone in the Philippines to pay for their account.

> They'd have to also block BIN ranges often used for virtual cards (e.g. those used by Brex, Wise, privacy.com) and ranges commonly used for prepaid cards. Otherwise it's still easy to bypass.

They sell netflix cards at supermarkets, so they would need to cease that also.

Just have separate prepaid cards per country? You're already paying the price for that country's content selection, so Netflix should have no issue giving you access to that content either.

That still allows easy bypassing of the country restrictions. If you're a local pay TV broadcaster who has paid a premium price for a show that is particularily attractive in a given country, you are not going to permit Netflix to sell the country you paid exclusive rights for.

Netflix could trivially buy the rights cheaply for a small country with a tiny economy and then use these cards to sell to the US or other major countries where the rights could cost a thousand percent more.

No competent distributor will let them do this.

Yes, it can be any random stranger. Just because you have access to a Netflix account, that doesn't mean you get to see/use the payment card details for something else.

If you don't believe me, ask a Chinese friend to show you how easy it is to buy a Netflix account on Taobao.

Getting access to a US citizens payment instrument would block 99.99% of such behavior.

agreed.. i would think it would be much more effective than geoblock.

It would be much easier to bypass by using the pirate bay though, in which case Netflix doesn't get any money at all.

I think this is why they're doing it this way, at least they get paid. For Netflix it doesn't really matter which region a subscriber uses as long as they pay.

I think they just act against VPN use because the content owners force them to. They love trying to enforce their old borders in a digital world that has none. Personally I think they should be happy that users are going out of their way to pay for the content given how many alternatives are available. They even pay more for the VPN itself.

Really, how many users will go like "Oh blast, my favourite show is not available in my region, guess I better wait until someone inks a deal and allows me to watch it"?

If I have a friend in the US, it's easier for them to set me up a guest account than for me to figure out how to use the Pirate Bay. Plus there's almost no risk of legal problems from using a friends Netflix account.

For now, yes. But they are definitely on a campaign to reduce the family sharing between countries as well. Along with this VPN ban I think they are just forcing people to pirate.

Just refusing to take someone's money and expecting them to wait until you will is not realistic. Even people that have worries about torrents will have friends/colleagues/nephews that are happy to produce a USB stick upon request.

There is no such thing as a Netflix guest account.

Sorry, set them up as a separate user.

Netflix has profiles intended to keep track of different members of the households preferred shows. The most expensive plan only allows 4 screens to be used at one time and they might notice when the "family" members appear to be in different countries.

In theory a single someone can share with another single someone but multiple households would be hard pressed to do so as it would be easy to exceed the number of screens preventing others who pay for the service from watching.

If you aren't already paying the extra $5 for 4 screens and UHD you only get 2 HD screens which is even more unsuited for sharing.

Why do the content owners restrict to particular country? It makes no sense to me. Do they lose money by doing this?

They restrict to a particular country because it makes vastly, vastly more money.

Shows are worth disproportionately more in some territories, local broadcasters are also very good customers they want to keep happy and only license in areas covered by their transmission windows, basic things like the structure of the school holidays and weather make a tremendous difference when it's profitable to launch a show etc etc.

> It would be nearly impossible for Netflix to comply with their agreements with content owners.

So perhaps Netflix should actually disrupt the industry by killing those stupid regional agreements that are a vestige from when film was distributed on reels.

Films are still sold that way, but if anyone could crack the country-specific market paradigm, surely Netflix could.

With every studio opening their own streaming service, Netflix doesn't have much negotiation power anymore. That's probably the reason of this change, they are trying to sweeten the deal with publishers to keep inventory on the platoform.

Netflix can’t even get parity for licensing on content they’ve helped produce/took over.

I stopped paying for Netflix for a lot of reasons, but the straw that broke the camels back for me was when I wanted to watch something with my Fiancé who lives in the UK and despite the series in question being branded a Netflix series, they didn’t have it on their service in the UK.

I don’t lay this all at Netflix’s feet. This stuff has always been fucked and Netflix has less leverage then ever since every other rights holders wants toss their hat into the ring and hope they reach at least a break even point while their competitors fail and then consolidation happens as the losers make deals with the winners.

I don’t mind paying for services but the incredible fragmentation of the market right now has pushed me back over the line where it is so much easier and more convenient with less bullshit (You still can’t get more than 720p unless you’re using Edge on PC) involved to torrent the limited selection of media I’m interested in again.

Netflix branding is routinely applied to content that Netflix has licensed for distribution in only part of the world. Their FAQ[1] suggests this is because Netflix wasn’t available worldwide at the time, but I’ve seen some internationally-produced shows arrive on Netflix in the US as originals when they aren’t branded as such elsewhere.

1. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/4976

"Netflix original" at this point literally just means "Netflix is showing this show for the first time in this particular territory." And nothing else.

We need to kill copyright itself. Once copying is no longer a crime, all these problems will solve themselves.

Contracts with the owners of the movies are a factor: Netflix might not have the right to show a given film in your country. Their contracts with the studios might require them to try to enforce this.

(You might consider re-reading my final sentence. The proximal cause isn't particularly interesting or surprising: the ultimate cause is the better mystery.)

What you are saying makes sense for legit viewers, but the goal of all this geofencing nonsense is ostensibly because content producers want to sue or press charges against pirates. They have to do that where the pirates are physically located, not where they got a credit card.

This is a shocking explanation, as it doesn't seem compatible with the oft-detailed explanation of these region locking mechanisms as being more about carving up contracts and extracting more value. As an example (from a year ago, before Paramount+, which has been confusing), you can watch Star Trek: Discovery in the United States... burn only on CBS All Access. Netflix managed to score the European rights to stream that, where CBS doesn't have a brand or any other particularly-interesting-to-that-audience content. Netflix thereby isn't allowed to show Star Trek: Discovery to people in the US, but I don't see how any explanation about that could be tied to pressing charges for piracy?

I’m totally talking out my ass, so don’t be too shocked. :-)

It could be that the decision about which service gets European access rights is made only after the decision about which content will even be allowed for broadcast in a region.

It could be that in these huge corporations, the business side of the company negotiates regional access rights. The totally separate legal department enforces the geofence, and they are driven more by their contact with content producers’ anti-piracy legal departments, squeaky wheel style.

Anyhow, like I said, just speculation.

It is extremely easy to buy card numbers, and Netflix sell pre-paid cards in some territories which are even easier to buy.

But yes, location is the thing that matters in contracts, because that is actually much easier to demonstrate.

I'm registered to vote in Michigan. I live in Mexico. Michigan's web site for requesting absentee ballots blocks connections from Mexico. I checked with various vpn endpoints, they seem to be blocking the poorer countries like Ukraine, Poland, Mexico, while passing the richer ones like UK, Germany, Canada.

What about running your own proxy or vpn on a vps?

I tried that on both AWS and on some super obscure (or so I thought), $2/mo Albanian VPS host. Both were blocked immediately.

Have you considered paying someone in the states to plug a raspberri pi into their router?

Now I just use a commercial VPN provider that does a decent job getting me through the screens.

I live in Japan and have the same problem with the Massachusetts department of state website (which contains voting information). I contacted my state representative (who does represent me, as I voted for him) and unfortunately he couldn't do much for me other than forward my inquiry.

Do you not have to be a resident of the state to be a voter?

You are a citizen of a state if you are a US citizen and reside in the state, but you may be a citizen of a state, and entitled to vote their, under other circumstances. Generally, I believe (and this is specifically the rule in California) citizens residing outside the US retain citizenship in the State (if any) in which they were last resident, and are eligible to vote more specifically based on their last resident address. (Military voters have different rules, this is general overseas citizens.)

From the US State Department:

>Most U.S. citizens 18 years or older who reside outside the United States are eligible to vote absentee for federal office candidates in U.S. primary and general elections. In addition, some states allow overseas citizens to vote for state and local office candidates and referendums. For information about your state, see the Voting Assistance Guide.

>In some states, U.S. citizens who are 18 years or older and were born abroad but who have never resided in the United States are eligible to vote absentee. Direct your questions about eligibility to local election officials

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...

> Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in

How about Google uses the user agent's language setting sent in the header? This frustrates me to no end living in Germany using an English language browser.

Why no website can do this correctly baffles me. My browser literally tells you what languages I want.

I think back to the beginning of the Internet.

The point was to connect computers together, and users, whatever their geographical location was. I'm still not certain why we allowed geographical restrictions to exist on these networks of tubes.

No one allowed it.

There was a business need so someone stepped up to fill the void by geomapping IPs. Given legal compliance concerns this was inevitable, even completely ignoring the profit potential from even very coarse-grained (ie. country-level) differential pricing.

Actively preventing this would have necessitated some pretty ugly tradeoffs which no one was incentivized to make.

Media licensing, The broadcast industry, and the lawyers firmly attached to it, pre-existed the Internet.

So now we have laws and customs from the 1930s governing streaming tv on the Internet.

Don't worry, with new laws requiring x% of content has to be made in a country, we can ensure that geolocking is enshrined in both old and modern laws.

These laws are simply ridiculous. Good content simply sells. Just look at Parasites, Money Heist. International success from small local foreign studios.

I feel your pain. I'm an American living in Australia, so I'm not as significantly affected. Still my Google account and Apple accounts are all US based. My Apple account is tied into a family account I share with my US based family. I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store. My Sony Android TV cannot download some Australian television apps.

I cannot purchase Audible audiobooks without VPN'ing back in to the US, even with credits I've accrued.

> I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store

That's awesome for tourists. Go for a few weeks and you can't access the local apps. Brilliant.

Yep, and some of them are quite important for tourists such as the national weather app (which has alerts for storms, flooding etc.).

Luckily these were easily side-loadable on an Android phone.

> I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store.

I wonder if this includes COVID contact tracing apps? It could be a very juicy story if so.

It does. I live in Germany, but am American. I couldn't download the EU Digital Vaccine Certificate app until I switched my Apple account from US to Germany...

Similar for me. My country of origin is the US, and my Apple account is connected to a US credit card. But I live in Israel and was vaccinated here. Since I am linked to the US App Store, I can't download the Israeli Vaccine Certification App ("Green Passport"). Nor can I easily switch my Apple account to Israel as I have several subscriptions that would need to be canceled.

Same here, but at least you can switch back to your original region once it downloads.

Have you considered going to the press with this story? It sounds like the kind of thing that could ultimately lead to a very critical piece in some major news media, which might push the tide back somewhat.

I move between three countries but have to keep my account region to my family’s because of family sharing.

I keep three accounts for the three regions, two dummy and one main. One inelegant solution I found is to sign out of the main account, sign in with a dummy account and install the apps I need from that region and signing back in with the main account.

The mobile apps for my US and Taiwanese banks are both region-locked to the US and Taiwan. Once I switched my region to Taiwan the Ally app stopped getting updates and eventually wouldn't let me sign into my account anymore.

As a Brit living in the middle East for most of the year, I resolved these issues by setting up Home Assistant in my house on UK with the wireguard add-on and upping my bandwidth so my local download speed matches the UK upload speed.

This allows me to use all UK services perfectly. Including iPlayer.

Good thing about wireguard is I can use it with my android TV also, making UK media consumption a breeze.

Thanks for the tip. From a 30,000 perspective, it’s crazy that we have to go through the wasteful exercise of shipping gigabytes of video data up and down scarce residential fiber for no other reason than to tick a performative copyright box.

> It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin.

Fun/sad fact (or not really a fact, honestly I didn't ask a lawyer to check) many are unaware off: "digital nomadism" is largely illegal, although nobody is hunting such people actively so far. The laws usually require you to have a local work permit if you work (even remotely, for your usual employer overseas) while residing in a foreign country.

Needless to say getting such a permit usually is unnecessarily hard. I believe governments should fix this by making it easy for foreigners working remotely on "leisure trips" to legalize their status and pay a reasonable amount of local taxes (to support the local infrastructure they use) while legitimately bypassing the mechanisms set to handicap them in competition with the local workforce (because they don't really compete with them in this case). Perhaps they could just introduce remote worker visa type which would be as easy to get as simple leisure travel visas are.

I think free, easy movement between countries is a thing of the past. Climate change is going to lead to nationalist isolation as countries try to preserve their resources as they start to run out.

Things are still largely locked down from the pandemic, and I don’t think international tourism will ever go back to being as easy as it was pre-pandemic. Many formerly bustling tourist sites have decided its really nice not to have tourists.

In this context, I think we can expect the Balkanization of the Internet to continue.

> Climate change is going to lead to nationalist isolation as countries try to preserve their resources as they start to run out.

War is likely as well.

I agree; and war has a way of closing borders. I have a feeling that international travel going forward is going to be only for the rich and well-connected.

> Things are still largely locked down from the pandemic

I doubt this can be forever because the effect is questionable (as long as countries don't put real lockdowns seriously quarantining every traveler with no exceptions and no chance to escape, and also eliminating illegal border crossing which is hardly possible) and the economic harm is enormous. I believe it's only a matter of time (and of financial resources running out perhaps) before every country will start treating COVID like ordinary influenza (which kills people too) and give up lockdowns.

> Many formerly bustling tourist sites have decided its really nice not to have tourists.

People who worked for tourist-dependent businesses will argue. Also note that for many countries tourism was the primary money source. In many such countries people don't care about COVID, don't wear masks (even though they are required to) and will probably resist governments which would block their income source for long.

> It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin.

It's a niche requirement. Commercial services aren't built for niche requirements because it's not worth it. Shouldn't be amazing.

The number of people working abroad globally is set to grow to over a hundred million in the next couple of years. I'd hardly call that niche, especially when that number looks set to continue climbing - especially when you also take into account the boom in remote work.

I'd call it pretty short-sighted to not see that as an ever increasing problem. I'd also posit that a solution wouldn't take a colossal amount of resources to solve in most cases.

It's not that they haven't thought about it. It's that it is not legally and economically viable (for them).

I understand where you are coming from but I think the post you're replying to is more pragmatic.

Let's say Netflix has to chose between two problems to solve: secure distribution for desired content, and ensuring that you can view that content wherever you are.

They likely see the tension between these things - the people who sell them media rights likely insist on tight region controls (or, would charge NF a lot more for "global" rights vs "US" rights.)

If NF messes up securing quality content, they risk losing most of their 75 million users. On the other hand, they risk inconveniencing ... thousands? Tens of thousands? of users while they are traveling.

I get their logic here.

I honestly don't think it is a complicated problem to solve when it comes to paid services. I'm making an assumption here, but I imagine as a matter of policy, every bank keeps on record if a bank account is local or foreign owned. And I'm also making an assumption that it wouldn't be a big reach for banks to share that information with payment services.

Following that, if you're using a local UK bank account, you should be able to access UK structured services. Yes, I'm sure it's not as simple as that, but I can't see such a system requiring a radical overhaul of how services are distributed. Of course dual passport holders will be net winners, but no system is perfect, and I can't imagine many people going to the trouble of getting a US passport just to watch reruns of The Sopranos.

You are deeply under-appreciating the non-technical complexity of this space.

Let's assume media rights are sold on exclusive regional basis. If I own the rights to distribute a show in Latvia, nobody else has that right. Meaning when Netflix buys the rights to stream that same show in the US, it is explicitly prohibited from streaming it to other countries because those rights belong to others (eg, if Netflix allows even a US citizen to stream that show in Latvia, that harms my right as the licensee there.)

I would be surprised if the contract language has provisions for "well, if a US person is in another country you can still stream it to them."

So to do what you're proposing, Netflix has to either put themselves in legal jeopardy by violating the contracts they signed limiting distribution to the US (I know you think it's fine but I bet their lawyers don't think it is) or they would have to pay much more for international distribution - meaning, if NF is allows to stream to everywhere, they have to pay the creators much more because the creators won't be able to sell to others (like my Latvian company.)

So you can see that Netflix's "cost" of making you happy is either being sued into oblivious or dramatically increasing their operating costs. Now, if there were so many people who'd sign up for NF if this was available, they'd certainly do it. But I am guessing this affects such a small minority of their users, and that an even smaller minority cancels subscriptions because of this, that it's just bad ROI and they don't do it.

I would think the law is more concerned that the UK version of the service, is being paid for by a UK account registered at a UK address, and paying UK fees. It's still being distributed to the UK as far as every financial transaction is concerned.

But I see your point, it's a license issue. I guess Netflix's lawyers should sharpen their pencils, because what you described is already happening, because despite their best efforts, the VPN's have managed to remain ahead.

Glad you see my point. This article is about NF making this even harder, so it sounds like they are on it.

It is never about blocking 100% of things - if your wall is 99.99999% effective then you can claim to have done what you need to do to be compliant with your contract.

Particular because the licence is functionally based upon where the eyeballs are physically located at the time the content enters them.

Content producers have to sue or press charges where the pirates live, not where they set up the account.

> I'm making an assumption here, but I imagine as a matter of policy, every bank keeps on record if a bank account is local or foreign owned.

Nope.

There are also some territories where there are significant cross country pollination of bank accounts - Australia and New Zealand are good examples. The EU is attempting to force cross territory banking without any limitations. Virtually nobody in the Middle East has a bank account in their actual country of residence.

> people who sell them media rights likely insist on tight region controls (or, would charge NF a lot more for "global" rights vs "US" rights.)

Netflix could tell them to pound sand. If those distributors want to sell their product, they’ll have to bend. What’s the alternative? Movie theaters? Netflix is such a market mover now, they can play a lot harder than in their early days.

> Netflix is such a market mover now, they can play a lot harder than in their early days.

They are no longer a market mover. Disney is.

Netflix should've "pounded everyone" five years ago when they were the only player in town. Now they don't even have content to show (my feed is 80% Netflix productions and 19% 10-20 year old movies).

Netflix were not ever, ever, ever the only player in town.

Ever.

They were the only one that mattered, for a long time.

> Let's say Netflix has to chose between two problems to solve: secure distribution for desired content, and ensuring that you can view that content wherever you are.

Security of distributing content has literally nothing to do with this. It has been shown times and again that Netflix reduced piracy in countries where it started operations.

Region blocking is the product of greed and shortsightedness by content owners.

This seems unlikely. In many cases multiple companies may own the rights to the same show for different regions. Of course there is going to be an X% discount on the contracts for Netflix if Netflix can prove they are not letting their content be seen out of region. Probably worth much more than the 1% of people who switch countries AND have picky preferences on languages/subscribing to multiple services.

> This seems unlikely.

It doesn't

> In many cases multiple companies may own the rights to the same show for different regions

Yes. And the only reason for many of those "different right in different regions" is greed and shortsightedness.

> Probably worth much more than the 1% of people who switch countries AND have picky preferences on languages/subscribing to multiple services.

You're completely ignoring all the other people who are willing to pay money and watch content that is region-locked for no reason. A German will happily watch original content from the states. Because it's not middle ages anymore, and people are quite happy watching content in multiple languages, because they know them.

It is piracy for Netflix to show content in regions it is not licensed to

In this case "securing" means "obtaining" (as in "secure the rights to") not some sort of DRM.

Netflix isn’t choosing the policy they’re just required to enforce them per the licensing restrictions of the content they get rights too.

The studios who license the content do so on a geographic basis to various streaming providers.

It’s all geographic because its easier, and makes for a more consistent policy that all involved (content owners and distribution partners) can agree to. It’s not that I don’t understand your frustration but the whole system is set up that you can watch the content you can stream from the providers who serve the region you’re in. If the content you want to view isn’t available from a regional provider that’s not Netflix’s fault.

It’s not at all “easy” to switch to using something like a billing address because of the entrenched nature of the licensing system and a lack of motivation on the parts of the studios who have a system that “works” and likely wouldn’t see the benefit of what you’re proposing.

Spending a lot of my time abroad, I want to agree. But the vast majority of those that 100M are the global poor being shipped to the global rich for quasi-indentured servitude. Those folks aren’t worried about Rick’n’Morty S5 being blocked, and even if they are, they’re poor so who cares. /s

> The number of people working abroad globally is set to grow to over a hundred million in the next couple of years.

If that's the case, expect a crackdown on it. As another poster pointed out, 'digital nomadism' is illegal in most countries.

> Netflix, like countless other online services, is not built for global citizens

Not a huge NF fan, but TBF Netflix is built for such a customer base — see how they don’t block their own material (as described in the article).

It’s the legacy rentiers who have control over distribution of various titles in individual countries. Those assholes need to die off.

Yeah, people who funded/ supported development of content need to die off because they like to recoup their investment in certain ways.

Yeah right, these are the people who got a license for their own geography years ago, won’t allow subtitling or control exposure absurdly. Whoever made the film has no say in this any more. Pathetic all around.

> Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in

I dunno about rightly if they're using your IP to determine language instead of the language setting (Accept-Language header) from your browser

They do this with good intentions because not everyone can change this header (e.g if you're using some locked down browser at a kiosk you may not be able to change this) but it's infuriating for everyone who can.

If you are using a locked down browser at a kiosk, you cannot change your IP either.

>. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin

I'm pretty sure they would take it into consideration, it's just that licensing of IP is a really tricky business. It's not a technical or business issue, it's a legal issue because bypassing geo-restrictions with a VPN is probably violating the terms of service of most content producers.

In the entire UAE IIRC only licensed telecommunications providers can produce telecom. services, and that's why Whatsapp can't offer call

Yeah like, if the licensing wasn't an issue, Netflix would have a menu somewhere where you could simply select a country. They aren't doing this to be malicious, they just can't legally show certain content in certain countries.

It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be.

The concept of "licensing territory" for IP is a 19th century relic. Licensing rights for streamed content could easily be made personal instead of national.

Given the amount of expense and effort required to police specific IPs, it would be likely cheaper to handle this with a fine-grained approach than to keep refining the current mess with ever-more-complex content limiting epicycles.

> It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be.

That describes all legal issues.

I agree with you that its a relic that we should get rid of.

But its not simple to get rid of. There are tons of existing contracts.

There are some companies that their whole business is being content "distributer" for countries/territories. They will do anything they can to make sure they stay in business. They might be equivalent of horse whip manufacturer, but that doesn't mean they will go down without a fight.

For giant content owners like Disney, its probably easier to "contract renegotiation". Netfilx even if they were prepared to pay for worldwide distribution deal, it doesn't mean that content owners are willing or able to sell (if they have other exclusive agreements).

This mess would take a while (and by that I mean years and possibly decades) even if there was somebody powerful pushing for it. And I am not sure if there is any such powerful entity pushing for it.

Another way would be to have some kind of international deal-agreement but that's even harder to get.

In short technical side is the easiest. And all IP/VPN blocking is peanuts compared to what it would cost(time and money) to renegotiate all the deals.

Maybe there's a high-tech solution here, like asking a UK friend to use their Netflix when they're asleep (given the time difference). Your friend would run a VPN on their home PC for you.

And honestly, I can't see Netflix caring enough to crack down on it. If anything, it mimics what N should do, which is offer people an account with a logical geography independent of physical geography.

This isn't a particularly good solution as it relies on another person's goodwill, which is neither reliable nor available to everyone.

Assuming that the current geo-located situation continues, and realistically who sees that changing?, what's needed is a legal framework that explicitly allows people from different countries to access citizen-appropriate content in other parts of the world. Why should I have to jump through hoops to access a paid service like Netflix just because I happen to be located abroad for a week?

VPNs were never more than a band-aid solution to relocation problems, and truly are a terrible solution. They don't actually offer anonymity, privacy, or convenience. Their original job - tying remote people into a private network - is the only thing they're truly good at.

Right - the legal system didn't have this problem before.

If you took a vacation in France, you could only watch what was on French TV or in their Cinemas.

Times have changed, and we'll suffer while old industries catch up.

FWIW, the "high-tech solution"--if we are already giving up any pretext that we are doing anything "by the book" (which simply isn't going to be allowed any way you slice it)--is to just scrape the movie someone wants out of Netflix and let them download it from you... it 100% "solves the problem" ;P.

Haha. I like your thinking, but it’s sort of what caused this last wave of crackdowns. All those “free” VPN services work by letting you VPN to another locale in return for letting other users use your machine as an exit node into your locale. (I’m guessing) Netflix decided to enumerate the “exit node” IPs for some of the free VPNs, and ended up blocking the residential IPs. I could even see it ensnaring innocent apartment dwellers using a NATed IP or people getting IPs recycled through DHCP.

Yeah, I hear you. I'm a US citizen, but live in South Africa. So I have to do extra auth steps to login to banking, when not on a VPN. And also, lots of places now are cracking down on VOIP phone. I very nearly couldn't login to my bank because they wanted a phone number with a physical address attached. Netflix is an annoyance, but its the general trend that is worrying.

I'm in a similar situation. Curious if you found a solution, perhaps a VOIP provider that accepts SMS shortcodes?

Even without switching countries, without a VPN every app on your phone knows when you leave home (switch from residential IP in city x to mobile IP in city x), arrive at work (switch from mobile IP in city x to business connection IP in city x), or take a flight (switch from mobile IP in city x to mobile IP in city y), or drive far, or check in to a hotel, et c et c et c.

VPNs are essential for people who need to obscure their travel patterns from data brokers, for privacy or physical security reasons.

Blocking them is like making an app that doesn't work at all with location services disabled: it's a privacy-invasive dick move.

As an expat from Canada living in Latin America and using a number of services from both regions, I've had similar probems, also these same problems with other services from specific countries outside of where I live that I need to use due to work.

Overall, this general location-obsessed balkanization of online servicces, websites and pages has become ridiculous. A great number of tech companies and websites, in ther fixation of "giving users a more localized, personalized experience" (in part mostly just tracking the shit out of them obsessively) have actually done more to break the ease of using the internet as a traveler and in ways that are ironic as helll when one considers the supposed ideals of an internet that was supposed to help more people become MORE global in their access to media, content and services regardless of where they reside or travel to.

What we're seeing is an absurd, almost fuedalized regression of what should and easily could be fully delocalized platforms, which ruins them in the name of supposedly making them better. It's tedious, annoying and increasingly common.

Even when logged in your google can sometimes roll back to arabic.

Go to accounts.google.com and there's an option for lagnauges and in there there's a setting called something like "automatically add languages", disable that one.

This is what I eventually had to do. Finding it was tough though, as the navigation was also in Arabic.

Slightly related: the Capitol One Mobile app just… doesn’t work in Ukraine.

Maybe they thought US citizens would never travel there. Thankfully, it works through a VPN.

US banks and state services so often ban ips outside the US.

Requesting records for anything is really hard when you can't even get the phone numbers from the website.

Having dealt with significant cyber attacks from Ukraine, Lithuania, and Russia, I can’t blame them for blocking. They probably could do it more elegantly however.

The first thing that irritated me when I moved to Qatar was how it was impossible to access a wide variety of US sites from foreign countries: my local trash service, Southwest Airlines... the list went on and on and on. I ended up standing up a VPN server in the US to deal with it, but it was a pain in the ass to deal with it.

I guess this all goes under falsehoods programmers believe about where people are.

>Whatsapp voice calls are blocked in Qatar.

that's probably a legal thing that you can't get around just because you happen to be visiting that country.

> I have a UK TV license but of course, I can't watch UK TV from Qatar.

Not from UK but isn't there any app from your Set-top box or DTH provider like Sky-TV app?

I recently found in India that the apps of our set-top box providers are completely functional to watch any TV channel you subscribe, I don't watch TV so I didn't know this earlier but the app was the only way I could watch olympics as events were telecasted across multiple channels often simultaneously and so I had the app in several devices at the same time streaming different events.

Try: www.google.co.uk/?gl=GB That should give you the same google as if you were in the UK. Or, that is what I use if I want to have the "pages from the UK" option.

Why do I have to tell each website the language I want in a website-specific way when there's been a standard HTTP header[1] to do exactly that for more than 20 years? I'm honestly asking: do web developers ignore know basic HTTP features or is there some specific reason?

I don't know what Google does exactly, but at least in my case the header works as expected. I live in Germany, have set the language to en-US everywhere and Google serves me an english page just like I want it. And I'm not even logged in to Google.

I agree that it should not be like this. I only offered a workaround, but in this case it's not only the language that changes, the entire site is served as if you geolocation is GB.

> rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in

The browser sends your configured language with literally every http request. If I'm in China, Chinese characters are really not going to help me no matter if I'm logged in or out. That's why my browser transfers that preference. Looking at IP only is just annoying.

Well, I think this is more of a licensing issue. The right owners expect the distributor to make sure to only distribute in areas they‘re allowed to by contract. Netflix understands global distribution and the power of availability, Hollywood & friends will follow some day, just a matter of time.

> Hollywood & friends will follow some day, just a matter of time.

Will I still be alive, though? Because I've been waiting for some time now.

The longest time I've worked overseas for was 3 months, so it's probably different to your experience. But I found the different content to be good. I had a whole new selection of shows and movies to watch since aside from the originals the content is pretty different between countries.

Consider finding a non-VPN-provider to set up your own tunnel via.

A VPS already bypasses known VPN provider ranges. A friend in the UK or US willing to put a box on their network and lose some bandwidth for a contribution towards a bigger connection would be even better (but of course requiring some trust)...

A VPS as a VPN server is coming from an IP range that belongs to a datacenter and netflix has Bern blockng these for some time atleast from Hetzner.

If you use a VPS from a big provider, sure that may well have the same issue.

> A friend in the UK or US willing to put a box on their network and lose some bandwidth.

It’s very tempting to ask a friend to buy a nuc, and just post them a pre-configured .m2 drive. Likely overkill as a Pi or similar would probably suffice.

If its any consolation, the BBC recently pulled everything half decent that they own off netflix (The office, red dwarf, extras, thick of it, and loads more), so you're not missing much

Use a VPN to UK via e.g. friend with fiber or your parents or other family. Not sure if you need to mind the TCP/IP stack, such as TTL?

If it's vital for you, then the best option is likely setting up a private VPN server at a friend's place in the relevant country.

If you have a house or family in the us or uk, could you make your own tunnel with a rasppi or nuc or something?

you could get a $5/mo vps and you can make your own vpn. it does not anonymize you, but it does give you an ip in the area you want and it won't be on any block lists since only you use it.

Only if your VPS is not in a big data centre, as they already block most of those.

terrible advice. almost all vps provider ip ranges are blanket banned

IANAL but if you decided to pirate the content I could see a case for Fair Use [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

There is a reason you are not a lawyer.

Why would you pay for a yearly Uk license??

To watch BBC content

> The law says you need to be covered by a TV Licence to: watch or record programmes as they’re being shown on TV, on any channel watch or stream programmes live on an online TV service (such as ITV Hub, All 4, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Now TV, Sky Go, etc.) download or watch any BBC programmes on BBC iPlayer.

You are supposed to but a TV license if you watch YouTube or Amazon Prime Video???

> You are supposed to but a TV license if you watch YouTube or Amazon Prime Video???

This is not about those platforms in general; it is about the likes of BBC iPlayer app on those platforms. Only the latter require a TV licence.

It is my understanding that, for example, watching BBC programmes on BritBox (a subscription-based streaming service from BBC and ITV) does not require a TV licence. [1]

[1] https://www.cordbusters.co.uk/tv-licence-in-the-uk-do-i-need...

Specifically if you watch live broadcasts on YouTube or Amazon Prime (in the case of Prime, I believe that's mainly sports events).

Watching regular YouTube videos or movies/shows on Prime does not require a TV license.

I’ve personally setup about 5 registered to Buckingham Palace. I wonder how many are registered to prominent UK addresses?

I don’t live in the UK, but she is my head of state, so I have found a use for my queen.

Its sometimes just bizarre. I once applied to Facebook from Bangalore and while everything on the website was in English, one of the final questions was about diversity and gender and while the question was in English the multiple choice response was only in Kannada. There was no way to change the language and anyway everything except the multiple choice part was in English. I finally defaulted to using Google Translate to get the correct answer.

I live abroad from some time and never had to use VPN, so vital is relative. The more annoying thing is phone numbers. More and more web services are using it as a security measure, and a lot aren't programmed to deal with international numbers. A bank in my country is especially idiotic in that respect, and I keep a monthly 5€ phone plan from there just to be sure I'll not lose access to a few websites.

> Google rightly defaults to Arabic

It’s not “rightly.” If I go to google.com, I expect google.com not the country-specific version. If, for example, I wanted Mexican google, I’d explicitly type google.com.mx etc. It’s a royal pain that google doesn’t respect the user’s intent and instead infers a language based on geography.

I'd say you are the exception here. Most people type google.com to get to Google, wherever they are.

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