That's not necessarily a problem. Facebook isn't restricted to high-ad-revenue countries. Their costs are so low that they don't mind making much less money in some places than others. The same is true of YouTube.

The reason so much content is region restricted is traditional Hollywood licensing deals. Just another example of their outmoded business methods.

If it's funded by ad revenue, there will be no reason to deny the third world.

In a sale model, dropping third world prices to locally affordable carries a risk of those copies being brought to the first world and resold. Viewers would buy the imports because they were cheaper.

In an ad model, the viewers don't pay. Instead watching an import would mean watching ads which were placed more cheaply, but are probably also less artistic and less targeted. No real incentive.

Ad sponsors from the third world countries themselves have no problem paying for advertising in their own countries.

Here in Portugal (not third world, I know) I get plenty of AdWords from national companies, much more than from international ones.

Global distribution territories are like a maze of twisty passages, none of which are alike.

Combining the other recent pg essay about schlepping, this is a major schlepping window of opportunity. If someone could find a way to make it easier for filmmakers to reach markets around the world, that would help the overall issue.

I don't just mean slap up a youtube clone and call the problem solved, I mean provide access to theatrical and tv gobally.

Major schlepping there, but probably a good opportunity too.

Alternatively, we might say regions allowed Hollywood to sell the same movie for more in the US than in Africa or China.

Same with prescription drugs, also a subject of these SOPA/PIPA laws.

GeoIP data is 99% accurate at the country level, so it's trivially easy to enforce regional restrictions on the internet, and some web sites have been doing it for a while. Sure, there are ways around that too, but most people are not technically inclined enough to figure them out. As one article recently posted on HN said (can't find it right now), we need to stop thinking only about technical solutions, and start attacking problems at the political and cultural level. After all, using a VPN to get around a restriction will only work until the authorities (government, RIAA, whoever) find a way to block it. It's a never ending arms race. We need to fix the political problem of censorship in order to achieve a permanent solution.

[ This comment is unavailable in your region. ]

Right... go tell that to Hulu and Netflix. I'd do it myself, but it's not available on my region. And I'm not even in a 3rd world country! Go figure...

Many new-ish forms of entertainment already use the web as a medium, but that has not helped the region problem much. Hulu, Netflix, Turntable.fm and many many other services are US-only.