On 13-05-24 02:57, Owen DeLong wrote:
That was exactly my point, Bill... If you have operations in RIPE and ARIN regions, it is entirely possible for you to obtain addresses from RIPE or ARIN and use them in both locations, or, obtain addresses from both RIPE and ARIN and use them in their respective regions, or mix and match in just about any imaginable way. Thus, IP addresses don't reside in regions, either. They are merely issued somewhat regionally.
Correct. But the fact remains that a lot of services assume geolocation works and do so in terms of restricting access to their content (oftent due to legacy content rights that require geolocation). One extreme example. A sports equipment retailer operates under a different banner in the province of Québec than in the rest of Canada. They geolocate the user's province and prevent québeckers from accessing the "rest of canada" web site. So residents of ontario who subscribe to an ISP based in Québec are blocked from the web site because that web site thinks they are based in Québec. The problem is with many web designers and managers who do not understand geolocation and the ISP business and how they are structured. In the case of the sports equipment chain. there is no real need to geoblock. (perhaps to prevent Québeckers from seeing the prices in the rest of canada ?) But in the case of entertainment, rights to programs are purchased with strict geolocation requirements. One example are pay TV channels TMN (Astral) and Movie Central (Shaw). The first has eastern canada, the later has western Canada. an IPTV BDU (regulated "cable" carrier (aka: cable competitor) must therefore ensure that a customer to whom it delivers the IPTV feed for "TMN" is located in the region for which TMN has rights. Same for all channels. And there is also pesky channel substitution requirements rhat are based on your location. In Canada, we are not allowed to watch a program on a US channel if a local TV channel carries the same program at same time. The better solution is to do like satellite BDUs do: billing address. But some web based systems ignore the unreliable geolocation services and use them to geolocate their customers. It is probably the fault of geolocation services which misrepresent the accuracy of their data. But if you can't beat them, you might as well join them, and that may mean separate IP blocks for different provinces/states and separate registrations so geoocation companies can at least get province/state right. It will get much worse if governments start to tax purchases/services based on gelocation.