American-only websites?

only able to view sites in America

[Linnian]

I was wondering how websites tell which country you are from. Google.com automatically redirects me to google.fr, and www.sho.com will only display a message saying "We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States." Does the ISP tell them? (i.e. is there no way of tricking the site into believing one is American for a day?)

Anyway, why are they so anxious to keep information within the US? I can see that Google might be trying to be helpful, but not Showtime...

[j4mes]

Hi Linnian, and welcome to WebmasterWorld!

I believe the standard way to tell what country a user is from is by IP address, which has come up a few times before here,

[webmasterworld.com...]

and there is a service that'll do that here:

[location.com.my...]

so you could try a quick site search of WebmasterWorld.

I'm not quite sure why anyone would want to block based on country, but being helpful like google seems sensible.

There are web-based proxy services (e.g. megaproxy) which will allow you to browse through them and pretend you're from America, in case you wanted to see what you were missing! :)

-- James.

[Linnian]

Wow, thank-you j4mes! That was exactly what I wanted to know.

[vkaryl]

I'm not quite sure why anyone would want to block based on country....

Well, just consider that CRPGs may not be sold in Germany (as an example) with the level of violence common in the US. We rate the games expecting parental control (presumably), but Germany simply refuses to allow access to them without a lot of devious circumvention - even to the point of (this is a few years back, not sure about now - my son-in-law retired....) not allowing px-bx stores to sell US approved games if they were "over the limit" as to Germany's stricter regs.

So perhaps some sites have been "warned" not to "go there"....

[Natashka]

Also they block because of the sponsor ads. Many ad networks pay only for US traffic, and if you get too much "outside demographic" traffic, they may even kick you out of network. Nobody wants to loose money. Me for example, I don't alow APNIC traffic on my sites for that reason.

[Leosghost]

In the case of France it also has to do with us here not being considered "safe" on the exportation of technology issues ...
It is illegal to own here( French gov rules ) software capable of better than 128 bit encryption...

PGP site in the USA will not accept downloads from french ISP ..
Proxy softs such as steg' are blocked by French Isps ..
course there are always ways around but usually apart from the games issue it comes down to encryption technology issues ..or prohibited products ..