(opinion) Now is the perfect time to kill content geoblocking for all, and here’s why.
The world has almost reached the point of IPv4 exhaustion. The final blocks of IPs are being carted around all over the globe, across countries, to places where IP addresses are falling short. That means that IPs are increasingly become more portable and are no longer specifically associated with the country.
Recently, APNIC (responsible for the IP allocation in the Asia-Pacific region) handed out one of the last few /24 blocks to its members. Most of these IPs were originally assigned to a Japanese locations. As service providers (ISPs) began assigning these IPs to their customers, streaming services began to break. Error messages started popping up… as if it say the internet is breaking apart. A long process of forcing third-party of change in geographical lookups for IPs will begin.
Sure, CG-NAT (carrier grade Network Address Translation) and eventual migration to IPv6 is supposed to fix all of this… but in the interim, IPs will become increasingly portable.
Now is the time to kill off geoblocking once and for all. We can all (except for those who like to rip Aussie consumers off) live a better and easier life 😉