The Dark Side Of Geolocation

While I was headed overseas and resting in an airport lounge in Vancouver, I launched the Netflix app on my iPhone to watch a film while I waited to board. I was greeted by a notice that because of my location in Canada that the selection of films will be different. "But, I have a U.S. account!", I thought.

Later, when I arrived overseas, I again wanted to enjoy a film while my legs recuperated from having been walking for 12 hours. This time what greeted me was not a limited selection but an outright ban from the app. I was completely cut off from my account in every possible way. I wanted to check my queues in a third party app for any movies I could try to find elsewhere but even their API is part of this blacklisting policy. iPhlix showed my two queues as empty. 

After some research on this issue and some alternatives, it seems Hulu Plus does the same. It seems the only provider that has negotated this into their contract with the curmudgeons in Hollywood is Apple. I was able to rent a two movies during my holiday without difficulty or limited selection. (Amazon is still in the stone-age sucking Adobe's you-know-what because they only use Flash and still don't have a mobile app.)

Now, explaining how asinine it is that a U.S. citizen with a U.S. account cannot access content he pays access to view would be preaching to the choir, so I will skip that. 

The problem lies in that all these new APIs and methods of determining someone's physical location are supposed to be moving the Internet forward, not backward. 

When Google knows I am in Tokyo and tailors search results relative to my location when I am searching for stores or cultural locations, this is good.

Using such a technology to support an antiquated business model that is built on regional licensing that does not account for citizenship or, you know, travel, is ridiculous. Obviously, Netflix wouldn't do this if they didn't have to but one can argue that they didn't try hard enough to negotiate against it. (Nobody knows what the deal with Hulu is since they are the media studios.)

This is the Internet, morons. Where I am sitting on the globe is of complete irrelevance.