When you send a DNS query to 8.8.8.8 it goes to the “nearest” resolver. Not nearest in terms of location since 8.8.8.8 is an anycast address and exists in many locations. It’s the BGP path to 8.8.8.8 that determines nearest. Next, the resolver
does it’s thing and sends a query to the akamai DNS. That DNS is probably also an anycast address so again, how close is it? Akamai then tries to geo locate you but they have the IP of Google, not you. You get an IP and connect to that. Everything up till
now probably doesn’t matter as it’s probably not the DNS that is causing what you see. The IP is not Nike but rather an akamai proxy. When you connect to akamai proxy, the proxy can see your IP and may do the Geo location lookup and pass what it thinks as
your location to the content server. When it gets to the content server, it may use that Geo information but possibly not. It’s likely it’s not the content server but a load balancer. In either case, they may ignore any Geo lookup done by akamai and try to
locate the incoming IP. Well, that’s actually the address of the akamai proxy. Hopefully the developers thought of this and had akamai pass your IP in a header and geo locate on that. It’s probably the content server that is sending an HTTP redirect to get
you to the “/ca” location on the site.
So there can be as many as 4 different times you are being geo-located. Which on actually matters is difficult to tell. Assuming Nike did a good job, it’s probably the Akamai proxy going the geo-locate and the code on the content server
is consuming that and redirecting you to the location specific part of the site.
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From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+bdantzig=medline.com@nanog.org> on behalf of Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net>
Date: Thursday, January 7, 2021 at 7:40 AM
To: "Becki Kain (.)" <bkain1@ford.com>
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Re: nike.com->nike.com/ca
CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize
the sender and know the content is safe.
Don't use other people's recursive DNS servers.
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent
Computing Solutions
Midwest
Internet Exchange
The
Brothers WISP
From:
"Becki Kain (.)" <bkain1@ford.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Wednesday, January 6, 2021 3:41:20 PM
Subject: nike.com->nike.com/ca
At home, using 8.8.8.8, if I goto
www.nike.com, I get rerouted to nike.com/ca. I cleared the dns cache (I’m running Catalina macos) and rebooted just because. Anyone else seen a weirdism on this? thanks
Becki in Detroit