AnchorFree
Geoblocking, the act of restricting web content or services based on a visitor’s location (as determined by his IP address), is a practice I have come to loathe. Being American, I am naturally drawn to web sites which serve content for American visitors. Being that I live in Korea, I am often prohibited from seeing the content I’m most interested in. I can’t watch TV shows at Hulu or YouTube. Certain online stores automatically redirect me to a Korean version with no option to shop in the American version, tell me the service is not available in my country, or restrict which products are available to me. For example, even though I can buy any version of the iPod I want in Korea, I can’t shop in the iTunes store (not available in my country). Another example is Direct2Drive, where I can buy games, but most of the ones I’m really interested in are restricted to North America (in which case, why the hell are you showing it to me anyway?).
And why do they have to tell me ‘service is not available in your country.’ It is, in fact, available in my country. I just don’t happen to be in my country right now, so it’s not available to me. Do they assume that everyone visiting their website from Korea is automatically Korean? Do they discount the hundreds of thousands of expats, soldiers and travelers who are somewhere in the world that is not their country?
I can go on and on about websites that use geoblocking. But after seeing a tweet by someone today, a whole new world has opened up to me. I had tried some VPN or IP masking software before that just didn’t work as advertised. But I had never heard of AnchorFree.com and their flagship product, Hotspot Shield. I did some research, discovered that it’s popular among Canadians, who are also blocked from accessing many of the sites I am, and decided to give it a try. If so many people are happily using it, the probability that it will turn my computer into a zombie is much smaller.
So far, I’m loving it. I can finally watch those old episodes of Star Trek I haven’t seen since I was a kid.
Geoblocking is something that just needs to die. It’s nothing more than another tool in the corporate toolbox intended to give producers more power over consumers, like DRM. And just like DRM, I see it backfiring. As long as they continue to do things that consumers don’t like, consumers will continue to work around it. Hotspot Shield won’t help me with a web site that won’t accept my credit card, an international Visa, because my billing address is in Korea (looking at you Adidas). But it will open the door to a lot more content that was previously restricted just because of where I choose to live.