Geoblocking is a restriction or denial of access to online content based on the user's geographic location.
How Does Geoblocking Work?
Geoblocking is commonly used by streaming services such as Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, and others. It may work like this: on Apple Music, song "A" may be available to users worldwide, song "B" may be available only to users in the United States, while song "C" may be available everywhere except Russia.
In some cases, an entire service may be unavailable in a particular country. For example, Spotify, Deezer, and Netflix are unavailable in Russia.
Why Was Geoblocking Introduced?
The short answer is that the reasons are primarily legal and commercial.
There are usually three parties involved. The first is you, the user who listens to music or watches movies online. The second is the streaming service that distributes the content, such as Netflix or Spotify. The third party is the content producer or rights holder, without whom the content could not legally be distributed.
Most commercial streaming services offer content to which they do not own all the rights. Before making such content available to users, a streaming service enters into an agreement with the rights holder and obtains the necessary distribution or streaming rights. These agreements commonly contain territorial restrictions and exclusivity clauses.
Streaming services generally do not want content they have paid to license to be freely available through competing services in territories where those competitors hold the relevant rights. Licensing agreements therefore specify where particular content may be distributed, taking into account other agreements the rights holder may have with local streaming services.
Some streaming services, such as HBO Max in the United States or BBC iPlayer in the United Kingdom, have historically operated under licensing arrangements that restrict certain content to a particular country.
There are also streaming companies that produce some or all of their own content and may therefore hold the relevant intellectual-property rights themselves. Examples include Netflix, Apple, and Amazon. Where they control the necessary rights, they can determine how and where their original content is distributed. As a result, their original productions are often made available to subscribers across multiple countries, although territorial restrictions can still apply depending on the specific title and licensing arrangements.
How Is Geoblocking Implemented?
Every device connected to the Internet uses an IP address. IP addresses can generally be associated with a geographic region, usually a country and sometimes a city or smaller area, although IP geolocation is not perfectly accurate.
Whenever you connect to an online service through its website or application, the service can normally see your public IP address. It can therefore estimate the geographic region from which you are connecting.
If a service determines that your connection appears to originate from an IP address associated with Russia, for example, and a particular movie is not licensed for distribution there, it may display a message such as "This movie is not available in your country."
What Other Methods of Geoblocking Are Used?
As technology has evolved, online services have gained access to additional ways of determining a user's location and enforcing geographic restrictions. Examples include:
- Mobile device location.
The location of a smartphone or tablet can be determined using several sources, not just its IP address. Depending on the device and permissions granted to an application, location data may come from cellular networks, Wi-Fi positioning, GPS, Bluetooth-based signals, or other location services. As a result, simply using a VPN may not be enough to bypass every location-based restriction. - Phone number.
When registering for a service, you may be required to provide a mobile phone number and verify it using an SMS code or an incoming call. The phone number can provide information about the country associated with the account. - Registered address.
This method is particularly common among financial and payment services. For example, a service such as Google AdSense or WebMoney may require identity or address verification, potentially including a document scan and a physical letter containing a verification code sent to the registered postal address.
VPN vs. Geoblocking
Bypassing IP-based geoblocking is relatively straightforward. Technologies such as VPNs and proxies can hide your original public IP address and route your traffic through a server with an IP address associated with another country.
This can make an online service believe that your connection originates from the country where the VPN or proxy server is located rather than from your actual location. With a VPN, the apparent location is generally determined by the geographic location of the VPN server you connect to.
Therefore, if you want to access content that is unavailable in your region, you can connect to a VPN server located in a country where the content is available.
Do streaming services know about VPNs and proxies? Absolutely. They actively attempt to detect and block them. Streaming platforms can maintain databases of IP addresses known to belong to VPN providers, proxy servers, and hosting companies. Some also use third-party commercial services that specialize in identifying VPN and proxy infrastructure.
As these known IP addresses are blocked more frequently, VPN and proxy providers continually develop new ways to make their infrastructure harder to identify. It is essentially an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between content platforms and circumvention services.
Is Geoblocking Legal?
The short answer is yes.
Content rights holders generally have the right to determine where their content can be distributed and under what conditions. These territorial restrictions are established through licensing agreements between rights holders and streaming services, and the services are normally required to comply with the restrictions specified in those agreements.