Legal and tax laws work off of what country banking or activity is in, never the "nation of association with a network address at the time of request." Ever. I work in international business, no government or business could ever use IP in that way. That's instant jail time. If you allowed tax or other violations and tried to claim you used an IP address, you can't even claim you tried to do the right thing. If you, like Hulu, breach your contracts and refuse to do business because you detect the wrong place or just use it to ignore legal requests, you are in hot water too.

Nothing with tax or legal can ever, will ever, ever has been able to use geo IP. That's clear cut. I'm open to being wrong, but I'm telling you logically it's so far out there it's like trying to argue that you don't have to pay taxes on leap years because the IRS automatically forgives all your debt. It makes no sense, and no entity would ever be so crazy.

LIcensing is a different animal and that's never using geo blocking that we've seen. Whether or not licensing by country is racist is a question on its own, but isn't about geo blocking. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But no one uses geo blocking for that. Nor would they, as it would be terrible business. Just throwing money away.

Example: Hulu is racist because they are willing to risk their customers who travel thinking that they are technologically incompetent (which is true, even if you don't travel, their service sucks at a tech level, fails constantly) and possibly out of business and cancel out of confusion rather than just inform them that the content isn't available where they are. Geo blocking isn't about restricting service, it's about hard stopping communications.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

No this is about products and services being restricted geographically due to licensing, legal, tax, etc reasons, and that it's never, if not rarely, due to racism.

Name any product restricted in that way for that reason? Legal, tax, etc. I've never heard of any case, ever, where that applies. Literally never one. I can't think of how it ever could.

LIcensing is different and doesn't include geoblocking in any example we know of so does not apply until we come up with an example. Hulu blocks access, not licensing so is clear cut racism. Netflix does not block access, only customizes licensing by what they are limited to provide. Seems non-racist. Nothing suspicious.

The two are polar opposites and are perfect examples of my point. One is out to hurt and trick. One is honest and helpful. They couldn't be more different.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

@scottalanmiller said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

That specifically correlates poor immigrants with low income schools to perpetuate the divide.

Oh yeah, I'm just confirming how it's done in the US.

I think it's the stupidest way to go about school funding in the entire world. You don't get that kind of problems elsewhere. I've lived in other countries too, and there are so many aspects the US just does completely stupidly wrong.

Right, it's horrid. And Texas then layers on other things to magnify it.

For example, they only offer certain extra curricular activity in rich districts. Then the public colleges only give scholarships based on those selected activities, not the ones broadly available at all schools.

The schools and the colleges are all the same political entity. They literally make a policy where poor kids are banned from scholarships based on zoning trends!

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Yes, generally speaking, Canadians are the "same race" as Americans, in that you consider that race as predominantly White/Caucasian.

This fails on many levels. Even inside Canada they don't see their white population, as you see it, as a single race. THey are HIGHLY divided.

Second, the US and Canada rarely see each other as the same race.

Third, we made many points that covered all of this including the concept that many Americans see "American" as the race. NO matter what race you and I see, matters nought. It only matters that they are identifiably different racial groups and people making racist actions will generally see that AND be able to identify that. Our personal opinions as to what should or shouldn't be a race isn't a factor, ever.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Yes, generally speaking, Canadians are the "same race" as Americans, in that you consider that race as predominantly White/Caucasian. Now, I don't know the percentages these days, but if you want to get a little more accurate, "Canadians" consist of every "race", just as "Americans" consist of every race. There are wite/caucasian, asian, black, etc. races in both Canada and the US. So to say one country is a single race is a flaw in itself.

You have to ignore everything about trends and generalities in order to say this. DO you see why someone reading this sees that you must logically be agreeing but emotionally resisting to make this kind of statement knowing that we already said why this would MEAN it was racist? Obviously to try to say that any amount of mixing means there can't be racism.

You can go lynch of group of black teenagers. As long as their one white friend gets lynched while with them, you can't be racist. How handy. Obviously no one is going to claim that being willing to hurt one person because they associate with a group you like or don't like stops something from being racist. But that's the mechanism you are using to say the US and Canada aren't obviously predominantly one thing (and one thing each, different from each other.)

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Yes, generally speaking, Canadians are the "same race" as Americans, in that you consider that race as predominantly White/Caucasian.

Yes, given post 20th century whitewashing they are. But traditionally, they are not both white.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Firstly, not everyone in a given country is the same race. So now that that is out of the way...

Yup, I covered that any why it doesn't matter.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

I understand "American" to mean a nationality, not a race.

Outside of the US, nationalities and races are intertwined to the point of being one and the same. The entire war with Russia is based on the ideology that Ukrainians are a subset of Russians and that Russia, having the name Russia, is the property owner of all people in that racial group around the world.

Nearly all countries exist on racial lines. Those lines move and shift over time. But the US is extremely unique in how non-homegenous it is. It's literally the most extreme example on the planet. So yes, American means nothing racial on its own, to people who know much about races. But to Americans, who broadly know little of the world, it often is seen as a race. It's said, all the time. So if you geo-blocked teh US and only the US, I'd agree that you could make an argument that you are blocking based on nationality, not race.

But as essentially all other countries exist based on race to some degree. Colombia and Venezuela are one race, split by geographic boundaries. Same with Nicaragua and Costa Rica. But after hundreds of years of geographic divides, they look a little different too. But like, Colombia and Brasil share a border and it's a racial one.

All the European countries are divided by old racial lines that have been there for thousands of years. Africa too. Asia as well. Very few are melting pots and those that are, are generally very specialized.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

That refers to your ancestry or ethnicity, which is more about cultural and geographical origins than race.

Those are my races. What race would you say that I am if not those? If you say American, I don't agree, but that would defeat the point about Canada.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

I have no idea the areas you are referring to. You'd have to look them up to see how much each school district collects from property/home taxes. Then see how much of that the schools in that district each get accordingly.

Why would that matter? You explained why it is detestable and racist. We all know it exists. Where it happens specifically isn't important. It's a known mechanism. And it's not unique to the US. Panama does it too, for example.

Texas is really bad with this and has layers and layers of these mechanisms to continuously maintain racial divides, while allowing special cases through in either direction (a rare white family becomes poor that wasn't before, a rare minority family runs a super successful business). Special cases don't generally bother racists, not much anyway. It's keeping populations apart and with one having an advantage over another.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Aren't school taxes (funding) based on the assessed value of the homes and property in a given school district? Did neighboring districts contain more higher value or overall higher value in property/homes?

Right. In racist areas, that's how it is done. That specifically correlates poor immigrants with low income schools to perpetuate the divide. That's a perfect example of how easily excused, but obviously racist mechanisms work. We all know that schools should have equal educational resources regardless of property value. Yet we don't do that in practice. We use parents' income as the guiding force in the quality of education we provide.

It is ignored because you can say "but poor whites live there too". And that's the standard racist trope. Because while they CAN, and a few DO, it's not the majority. It takes those who are disadvantaged (generally minorities) and makes it harder to get public resources for children who should always be treated equally. Then the children of the poor have less education, fewer connections, and are easily identified as being poor. Further isolating them. This keeps races apart easily, while technically not drawing a hard line by race.

Everything that I'm talking about is like this. Using sweeping population generalities and being willing to sacrifice a few outliers in order to keep the majority of each group where they want them. Rich in one case, poor in the other.

It's worth pointing out, though, that Canada and the US have different racial makeups of their white populations as well. Canada is far more "white" than the US is. To the point that until the mid-20th century, not until the white washing of WW2, Americans weren't considered broadly white while Canadians were. That white Americans are considered white is a relatively new thing because Brits and Celts were traditionally considered white while Germans were not. Only after Hitler did groups like Germans, Dutch, French, Italian, etc. become considered white and not for decades later before Arabs, Jews, Spaniards, Portugese, etc. get added to the white listings.

So traditionally the US and Canada have actually had a strong racial divide. One that the Germans counted on in the war to divide us, which they miscalculated. But the risk was real. With tons of Germans, Dutch and Italians in the US, and mostly British and French in Canada, the differences do exist.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

@scottalanmiller said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

That it isn't about racism or geo blocking and the example has nothing whatsoever to do with the discussion?

It 100% has to do with the discussion.

Hulu is blocked in Canada just as it is in Nicaragua. Not because of racial reasons. Hulu is blocked in Canada, specifically, due to licensing rights and agreements. That is not racially motivated at all. It's legal.

However, if you are telling me that race can never include "American" then you are getting into a quagmire. As someone who grew up in the US, I have zero "identifies as American", I identify as Swiss/Dutch/Scottish and always have. However, being European American (A European born in America) I get constant flak from "Americans" who say anyone born in America is American by race and it is a wideheld belief that the time has passed for Americans to maintain racial identity ties to their home countries. I don't agree, but it's a STRONG racial belief in America. To the point that both the US and Mexico generally consider your "Mexican-ness" to be stripped from you if you go a generation in the US and that you turn into American and can't claim to be Mexican anymore (not true, just both sides say that a lot.)

To say that Canadians are the "same race" as Americans, while in many ways you are right, isn't a universal, or even close to universal, racial belief and as long as huge swaths of people see them as two races, an act of one race against the other on the basis of nothing other than their assumed race remains... racist.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Hulu is blocked in Canada just as it is in Nicaragua. Not because of racial reasons. Hulu is blocked in Canada, specifically, due to licensing rights and agreements. That is not racially motivated at all.

YOu are telling me that Hulu's website doesn't load in Canada and when you go to it it acts like the services doesn't exist and if you try to cancel your CC payments they don't allow you to stop payment while also violating their contractual agreement to provide service? That feels... pretty unlikely but I guess it is plausible.

The discussion is about geo blocking. The use of IP to stop network traffic with no notification or essentially none (you've been blocked is still blocking.) It is NOT the use of IP to modifying which services are provided or how. You can make a great argument that that is or is not racist and I think most people would agree it is racist but within an acceptable range and not the fault of the vendor mentioned but of the licensee. But your examples of Netflix isn't blocking and isn't racist. Hulu is blocking and is racist. Black and white, night and day. The two examples are wholly different in practice, in implementation, in intent. Polar opposites.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

@scottalanmiller said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Nice try, that's not licensing or regulation. That's flat our racism in every sense.

The same is true in Canada. How are they racist against Canadians and not US citizens? Are US citizens and Canadians not of the same race?

The same is true in Canada what? That it isn't about racism or geo blocking and the example has nothing whatsoever to do with the discussion? Yes, in that sense, the lack of applicability also applies to Canada, China, wherever you like.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

It's not racially motivated, really, ever.

That's quite a statement. Do you have a single example of a geo blocked resource that has a viable reason to be blocked? One that actually makes money or satisfies a regulatory requirement?

I've been talking about this for years. I've talked to companies that have done this. I've never once had someone actually try to show it wasn't racist. Only people who got upset getting caught being racist. But none ever provided a logical reason for risking losing business or just being bad people.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Likely aren't available at all in some countries. Why? Certainly not racially motivated. It's all about licensing/legal/regulatory reasons. Race has nothing at all to do with it.

Do you have any examples of geo blocking or are you grasping at straws only? These are all things we can use here.

Likewise, tons of websites I use now detect my location and force me to use Spanish. I hate that, but it's not blocking. It's an attempt to customize services for what they wrongfully assume is best for me.

I also constantly get sent to UK versions of online stores when I clearly indicated American ones. It's foolish and myopic, but it's not geo blocking nor obviously racist.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Netflix has different content available in different countries. Why? Certainly not racially motivated. Definitely about licensing agreements. (regulatory)

RIght, not blocked. Netflix works here and they make it clear that they provide content by "area detected." It's open and clear and you are never blocked.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Example: Hulu... that's not really available anywhere outside the US. Why? Certainly not racially motivated... but licensing I'm guessing? (regulatory)

I actually talked to them when I moved outside of the US. They don't just block their streaming service. They block their customer service, violating the law. They BREACH regulations in doing that. I actually had the Hulu rep complain that it was racist that only people actively in America could cancel their accounts since you couldn't even get service AND your only recourse was reporting credit card fraud.

Nice try, that's not licensing or regulation. That's flat our racism in every sense. Blocking the stream only, but providing a notice that the IP is detected outside a license zone isn't geo blocking, that's geo informing. They actually block and in doing so, break the law. So, yes, good point but not to the one you thought you were making.