>The entire thing is a farce. There has never been any way to know where an endpoint device is

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 never said that such blocks were a good idea, nor did I say that they work.

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.