What is your opinion on websites blocking visitors from specific countries (geoblocking) for personal or political reasons?

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There are a few countries out there that people love to hate. Sometimes they choose to block all visitors from those countries to their websites. What is your opinion on the practice? Note that I am not talking about blocking for legal or copyright reasons, or about blocking done by the countries’ authorities or ISPs, only by the websites themselves.

Does your opinion change depending on whether the website in question is a personal website or blog, versus a website for a free/libre/open-source software project, versus a public service (e.g. a Fediverse instance)? Would you stop using your Lemmy instance if you learn that it is blocking visitors from certain countries?

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A friend of mine was a security administrator for a small webhosting company for a while and he would often block certain countries based on the fact that his company didn’t do any business in those countries, and simultaneously those countries were prominent sources of malicious traffic. Not to say that the only traffic from those places is malicious, but if you don’t plan on offering any services in those areas it definitely makes sense to geoblock them from a security standpoint.

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This makes sense for a website for a commercial service. This question is more about personal blogs, FLOSS project websites, or other similar websites that could be equally useful to people from all countries.

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Security still plays. If I'm offering a blog for instance or some FOSS software that isn't in Russian or about Russia and I'm getting frequent bad traffic from Russia, I'm probably going to geoblock Russia.

Security is very often the reason (other than legality or copyright) that web services employ geoblocking. While people can easily circumvent this via VPN or any number of other methods, this takes slightly more effort which helps improve the overall signal to noise ratio for web-traffic considerably. 

It's not about trying to stop those people from accessing that service per se, it's just a fact that there are a number of countries who don't have laws or don't enforce laws regarding tampering with foreign systems. While this may be the action of just a few people in any given country, the traffic can be from many thousands of different IP addresses which may only have a country of origin in common.

Attacks on FOSS software as a means of gaining illicit access to organizations using that product as part of their infrastructure are more and more common (search: supply chain attacks). People who are earnestly trying to use a website that they are being geoblocked from are sadly caught in the crossfire of a fight they have no part in, and probably don'tknow is happening. However, the people doing the geo blocking are generally not doing so out of malice, but out of necessity.
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You expect everyone to just have a neutral opinion of every country and the majority views of its citizens?

I don’t care if an individual in Russia is ‘good’ because I have no way of verifying that so I block them from everything.

Chances are high that if my project/blog or whatever helps a Russian it’s someone who holds very different political beliefs so I would rather not.

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Who does that “for personal or political reasons”? I know that it’s sometimes done because there are a lot of hacking attempts but few to none genuine users from certain countries.

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“For personal or political reasons” means as a form of boycott or similar. Not to stop hacking or other abuse, not for legal or cost reasons, but just because of personal animosity towards a country.

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Kinda depends on the specific reasons.

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There are a few countries out there that people love to hate

This whole post seems like you’re intentionally not saying a country because everyone would agree it’s a right-wing authoritarian government with no internal press freedoms and a population in updated with propaganda whose Internet is sanctioned as a result of human rights abuses by their government….

Like, most people don’t just “love to hate” random countries, and most people who complain about “haters” won’t acknowledge any of their own flaws

So…

What countries are you actually talking about?

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It’s quite annoying as I have to close my torrent client and switch the VPN to another server.

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Web sites cannot know the geographic location of all their visitors, and it’s silly of them to pretend otherwise.

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I know we liked to call it “the world wide” web, but realistically the owners and operators of websites are individuals, people who live in a nation-state and are subject to their society’s rules. Although American capitalists really tried, it’s not fair to expect one website to serve the entire world’s needs or be a truly global public service. If we want that, we’d need to collaborate at the UN to make it happen.

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When you host a website that isn’t an essential public service, you’re free to block whomever you (don’t) like.

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It’s frustrating getting errors that I can’t load a website because I’m in a certain country, and I’m not even in/from that country.

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I don’t blanket block but do geochallenge certain areas. Why, well I doubt anyone in the countries I do place geochallenges on give a crap about anything on my sites and are mainly looking to break in for nefarious reasons.

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Nothing should be Geoblocked.
You block bad actors, not entire portions of Earth.
Geoblocking is only used by psycho dictators and corporations trying to squeeze a profit out of everyone while screwing the artists.

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When I played battlefield 3 all the french servers would kick me for having an american ip :{

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Information wants to be free, but you have to play the game that’s on the table

I can’t fault a website for blocking visitors as required by their political bs, but I can strongly disagree with that political bs where I live. If any web site is blocking more visitors than required, I’m not going there anyway

I think there’s recent age verification requirements among certain part of the US, or at least certain sites recently added hoops to jump through, effing fascists - I’m strongly opposed anyway

I go back and forth about privacy issues. First impression is my name and email are none of your effing business. My second reaction is I’ll just generate a unique forwarding email address with no connection to my data. Then they require a valid phone number, dammit

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