The entire thing is a farce. There has never been any way to know where an endpoint device is
And VPNs are often necessary to prevent the service from detecting it wrong.
Suppose I'm currently near an international border and my phone picks up a tower on the other side of the border. Now the IP address my phone gets is listed as being in the wrong country.
A lot of companies route all their traffic through a head office somewhere so they can inspect the traffic in a central location. It's not always in the same country where the users are.
Suppose I'm using a VPN for privacy reasons, not to bypass geographic restrictions, but I want it to be in a different country to maximize the inconvenience to anyone trying to violate my privacy, so now the country listed is the wrong one. I would have to use another VPN to get it back to being where I actually am.
The obvious solution to all of this is to forget about trying to tie locations to IP addresses, since that has never worked, and just ask the user's device what country it's in. The user can set it to a different one but that's no different than the status quo.
A good point. Note that I said:
IP blocks...are sometimes necessary for the site
to at least *attempt to stay in contractual
compliance* with the content owners.
I merely suggested that such geo-blocks could be a result of contractual requirements between the distributors and the content owners.
Personally, I think it's dumb too.
But I'm not a content distributor or content owner. As such, my opinion has no impact on the legal contracts between such entities.
>The obvious solution to all of this is to forget about trying to tie locations to IP addresses, since that has never worked, and just ask the user's device what country it's in. The user can set it to a different one but that's no different than the status quo.
You won't get any argument about that from me.
IIUC, there was no attempt to "bypass security." Rather, HiQ Labs was scraping unrestricted (i.e., not restricted by user ACLs) portions of Linkedin's web platform.
If any random user can access a particular web page, it's (IMHO) publicly available and using automated tools to scrape those pages is perfectly legal.
In fact, such scraping is done all the time on airline, hotel and other websites without issue.
As for VPNs, I'm guessing that LinkedIn blocked HiQ Labs' IP range, so they used a VPN to continue scraping the public pages. If my assumption isn't valid, please correct me. That
IP blocks (I'm thinking geo-blocks[0] for sites like Netflix) are sometimes necessary for the site to at least attempt to stay in contractual compliance with the content owners.
However, that doesn't seem to be the case here. If (again, this is my understanding) LinkedIn is just blocking HiQ Labs' IP range, but no one else's, that seems (as the 9th Circuit originally ruled[1]) like a targeted attempt to interfere with HiQ Labs' business:
Given that the issue here is publicly accessible content as compared to, say, geo-blocking of unlicensed (for that particular region) content, there is no basis to disallow such access.I say this because I (or HQ Labs) could manually enter all publicly accessible URLs at LinkedIn and copy-paste the returned contents.
While that would be an arduous process, it's not only perfectly legal, it's LinkedIn's intent to provide those pages without requiring a login -- validated by the fact they don't require logins to access those pages, while they do require logins to access others.
IANAL, but it seems to me that worrying about using VPNs becoming a criminal act is a tempest in a teapot.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo-blocking
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
Edit: Corrected company name (HiQ vs. HiQ Labs).