The European Commission (EC) has been looking into how PC video games are bought and sold within EU Member States, and it doesn’t like what it’s seen. Issuing an official statement of objections today, directed at Valve, whose Steam online portal is the biggest store for PC games in the world, and five game publishers — Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media, and ZeniMax — the Commission takes the view that they’ve all engaged in antitrust violations by putting geographic restrictions on the games they sell.
Good. Geofencing digital goods is clearly not allowed, but a lot of companies still try and get away with it.
It might bring some good, but like every other issue it is more of a scale of grays, then a black and white choice.
Geo restrictions (let’s call kind-1) allows selling the same goods cheaper in markets where people’s disposable income is lower. It prevents piracy, and allows funding localization of content. (If say, for example, you know you cannot sell in a certain market, then it does not make sense to have a local version in that language which would only be pirated).
But there is also a second version, where people roaming during holidays, or working / living across multiple regions lose access to their own purchased content, just because their IP address happens to be abroad. There is very “draconian” restrictions which even prevent VPN based access.
A reasonable compromise would tentatively allow the first kind, at least as the lesser evil for a while, but not allow the second, where people lose access to the content they have already paid for.
However I would be very naive to expect reasonable solutions in the short term.
sukru,
A reasonable solution: give people the explicit right to buy and use digital goods from anywhere they choose since their rights ought to outweigh a corporation’s right to restrict commerce for marketing purposes. There’s no need for it to be more complicated than that. Geoblocking based on location is inherently discriminatory, which IMHO laws should strongly discourage.
Alfman,
That would be nice in theory, however there are unwelcome side effects in practice.
Take my native country of Turkey for example. Unfortunately our economy is not doing well nowadays, hence Netflix is offering their plans for about $3 / month.
If the Turkish bid for EU membership was successful, and geoblocked plans were outlawed in EU, barring overnight 50% improvement in the economy one of the following would occur:
A. Netllix would abandon the Turkish plan, and fold users in Turkey with more expensive EU members.
B. Netflix would keep the Turkish option, but would cripple it so that it would not be competitive with its “full” plans, including severely reducing the catalog size, replacing original audio with Turkish dubs, etc.
Basically removing the Turkish geoblocked option will harm users in Turkey, but will benefit no one.
Hence the simple solution is not as easy as it sounds.
sukru,
I don’t agree, netflix geoblocking results in subpar programming for regions that get less content and get it only after waiting until it plays elsewhere. Most users would not be interested in a $3 turkish account due to “inferior programming” aspect. To the extent that a Turkish user wants to pay for US programming, or a US user wants to pay for Turkish programming, well too damn bad for netflix marketers who want to discriminate based on where one lives, it should be against the law end of story. To the extent that netflix stops offering affordable service to Turkish users, that opens up opportunities for new competitors to displace netflix in Turkey and elsewhere.
I don’t know if you realized this, but netflix users around the world are actually trying to pay more for VPN services just to circumvent region based content restrictions.
https://www.bestvpn.com/vpn-comparison/unblock-netflix-vpn/
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/vpns-still-work-netflix/
https://www.expressvpn.com/vpn-service/netflix-vpn
https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/netflix-vpn-unblock-proxy-error/
The elimination of geoblocking would clearly increase demand for accounts with better programming. Most would not be interested in buying more limited programming from Turkey. But there are some of us here in the US who would benefit from overseas programming as well, which is infuriatingly geoblocked from us too, especially foreign language content.
If there’s a demand for $3 accounts, then great. If there’s a demand for $12 accounts, then great. Let customers choose what they want for themselves and quit relying on IP geoblocking to restrict programming options.
Region coded DVDs were bad, region coded games are bad, region coded streaming is bad. So I’m all for the EU outlawing geoblocking and giving consumers the right to choose what works for them without regard to what their IP lookup says they’re allowed to have. This will give us more choices rather than fewer.
I found a pretty comprehensive list of content affected by netflix geoblocking…
https://www.finder.com/netflix-usa-vs-world-content
Turkey, which you mentioned has 16.25% of the TV catalog and 10.65% of the movie catalog offered in the US.
As it applies to our discussion, I think if people want to buy the Turkey subscription, they should be allowed. Conversely if Turkish users want to buy a US subscription, they should be allowed to as well. We don’t need to complicate things with geoblocking.
Of course today netflix may be bound by the studios in terms of where they’re allowed to stream content to, but assuming the laws applied to the studios as well as netflix, the whole geoblocking issue can go away for everyone.