<rant>

Is it just me, or is the Internet increasingly becoming a bordered world?

From iTunes store accounts linked to credit cards, to GeoIP technology, it seems that services are relying more and more on being focused on one, geo-politically defined audience.

The most annoying instance of this is the BBC iPlayer. The absurd situation of BBC Worldwide, the commercial division of the BBC which sells programmes and formats outside the UK, as well as bandwidth concerns, has led to geographic restrictions being placed on where the iPlayer can be accessed from. Unfortunately, the implementation isn’t linked to having paid for a TV licence (and therefore accessible from anywhere), but rather based on GeoIP technology: checking AS numbers, reverse DNS lookups and other such things against known geographic locations. There are workarounds, but blech to that.

This seems poor to me. The geographic restrictions are some of the main reasons the iPlayer is reliant on DRM and proprietary technologies, things the BBC, as a public broadcaster, should not be involved with.

The same sort of thing is going on with Hulu, NBC.com, and the like. But those are commercial companies, not publicly-funded broadcasters with a public service mission.

It’s unfortunate not only for that reason, but also because end-to-end openness and non-discrimination is one of the best things about the Internet. It’s a positive benefit to me that a I get exactly the same connectivity regardless of location. Things might happen slower, but a lack of discrimination and intermediate futzing is definitely a good thing.

We don’t want to get to a situation where there’s a British Internet *shudder*, German Internet, Australian internet, and so on. So let’s just nip this in the bud, folks. If it’s out there, it’s out there.

</rant>