Reasons to geo-block a website
You may wonder what reasons there is so that a web page or any online service is blocked depending on where we are. And there are several causes, as we will see. However, the truth is that we have some options to bypass that blockage and be able to navigate normally.
The first reason is because legal and licensing issues. Take, for example, a television channel in Italy that broadcasts matches in the Spanish soccer league. They have paid for their license and can legally cast those matches in their country. That channel can be seen on the Internet. The problem is that, in Spain, there are other channels that have paid for that license. What if anyone can enter that Italian page and watch the game? That causes them to geo-block that site.
The same thing that we mentioned can also be applied to series and movies. A platform, such as Netflix, may have paid to cast a series in a specific country but have not paid a license for Spain. Subscribers in our country may even have to pay an extra for that series. By geo-blocking that movie or series, we would not be able to see it.
Another reason is to divide by market segments countries. We cannot say that it is a strict block as such, but it does prevent us from accessing a website in the same way that other people see it. For example, this often happens on certain news pages. If we enter the United States domain from Spain, for example, it automatically redirects us to the Spanish domain or the European site.
A third reason is because laws of a country. This occurs in countries where there is censorship or certain services are blocked. For example in China we cannot access Facebook or Google. Those platforms are geographically blocked.
It is possible to avoid blocking
Although this that we have mentioned is very common and there are many web pages that are geo-blocked, there are options to avoid it. Also, it is not complicated. It is possible to browse the Internet as if we were in another location and thus skip any restrictions.
One of the options to avoid blocking a page is to use a VPN. It is a program that encrypts the connection, hides the IP address and, in this way, modifies our real connection. What we do is access that site through another server. That server may be hosted in another country, in which that website is fully accessible without problems.
Another similar option is through a proxy. We are going to go out through an intermediate server and, in this way, we will hide the real geographical location. It is another method to bypass the blockade and be able to enter a web page. Even with the tor browser we will be able to hide the IP and skip these blocks.
