South Africa too - think the website devs are just lazy or we are not their target audience - it is not like we are going to vote for Trump although there is a lot of Trump supporters here as well :)

> Why is the website georestricted?

Because they are a US only website which doesn't want or care about other markets.

My guess would be somewhere between GDPR and legal liabilities (for EU anyway).

I'm guessing they're not prepared to deal with privacy concerns but its just a guess.

That would probably be it. It's a nightmare complying with GDPR if you're a small company and it becomes even more of a problem when people could use it as a weapon by making thousands of requests for their data. If you have a lot of users you really need to have everything automated otherwise just complying with the law becomes prohibitively expensive.

it seems to be only DNS (or perhaps cookie?) oriented. I didn't realize I was connected to VPN and it worked, so I was like hmm. then noticed vpn, so disabled and refreshing in firefox wasn't a problem, but when I then opened it in chrome, it showed the geoblock (and further refreshes in firefox continued to work).

Means they don't have to deal with laws of other countries.

Is that really how "laws of other countries" work?

People from all around the world can visit the US or get a US IP via some other mechanism (by using a cloud browser for example) and then they will see the content anyhow.

With the infamous GDPR for example, it does not matter if you georestrict your content. If you track someone from a European country without their consent, no matter where they are, you are violating the GDPR.

> With the infamous GDPR for example, it does not matter if you georestrict your content. If you track someone from a European country without their consent, no matter where they are, you are violating the GDPR.

In the following, "you" means the entity dealing with personal data, and "them", "their", "they", etc., refer to the person who's personal data you are dealing with.

You have to follow GDPR if:

1. You are in the Union, regardless of where they are.

2. You are not in the Union, and

2a. You are offering goods or services to them and they are in the Union, or

2b. You are monitoring their behavior as far as their behavior takes place in the Union.

For 2a, you have to envisage offering services to them. If they come to your site and it works but you didn't envisage offering services to them it is not enough for 2a.

For 2b, what is important is whether or not you are profiling them, particularly in in order to take decisions concerning them or for analyzing or predicting their personal preferences, behaviors, and attitudes.

Trying to block EU users won't help with 2b, but it can greatly help with 2a in showing that you did not envisage serving EU users. For a lot of sites avoiding 2a is all they need to avoid GDPR completely.

I’m not disputing this is the case ( you fall under GDPR even if you put a geo blocker ) but, I feel like this is something absurd from GDPRs part.

If you say “we don’t want eu clients” and actively try to keep them away, to me it makes sense not to be liable anymore.

I feel like it’s like, let’s say this scenario. I’m pretty sure in Germany it’s illegal to host content promoting nazisim. Let’s say a hacker posts against all measures taken by the company content that is against the law. Should the german website be held accountable for content they unwilling hosted for a time? Shouldn’t the fact this was done against the wishes of the platform matter?

I might be wrong technically with the german example but the point still stands. I don’t think a platform should be liable if it’s in breach of a law against it’s wishes, if it has reasonable prevention and mitigation measures in place.

Of course in the marginal cases. But even simple restrictions greatly reduce liability. And anyways running afoul of gdpr will not affect you much if you don't plan to do business in the EU

Showing an ad to an EU citizen or someone in the EU is doing business in the EU, says the EU.

But indeed, you are correct that geoblocks reduce liability.

No but what is the EU going to do to a US company that will likely never set foot in Europe. Unless of course Mr Trump is keen on getting a golden visa

The European Commission sent me some questions about competing with Google. I couldn't figure out if it was because I was a search engine, or if it was just that I had an app that competed with some part of Google.

Either way, I asked my lawyers if I had to answer, given that we had zero revenue coming in from Europe. They said no, I didn't for this kind of request, but they could easily send me a more vehement request that I did need to answer.

I ignored the EC, and didn't get that second letter.

BTW, my lawyers are smart enough that I had the only search engine threatened by but never sued by Perfect 10.

iirc Gdpr only applies if you target EU citizens. Blocking the EU from their website means they aren't targeting EU citizens.

You recall wrong.

Pretty sure the GDPR does say that. eitherway, what is the EU going to do a about it?

Have you ever vacationed in Europe?

Remember those VW execs arrested while going to vacation in the US? Part of "dieselgate".

This isn't even true. Websites do that to "avoid" GDPR but GDPR very clearly says it applies to EU citizen, not people in the EU, so if you geoblock the EU but still store the data of a EU citizen using a VPN / in vacation you're breaking the law.

> [...] GDPR very clearly says it applies to EU citizen, not people in the EU [...]

What it says is that it applies to data subjects who are "in the Union". The word "citizen" does not appear anywhere in GDPR or in the accompanying recitals.

It seems to work fine in the UK, including phone verification.

Pretty good way to prevent many of the targets of the hatred from their users from signing up and fighting back.