@Mario-Jakovina said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

I do not think we are "entitled" to access all sites by default - if someone do not want it's site to be accessible from Europe, I'm find with it.

In the same vein, I don't think any human should be "entitled" to use someones race or proxy for race, like nationality, as a determining factor for anything. The idea that people who live in, or are willing to travel to, certain regions should be excluded goes down the path of... you can do anything you want. Where does that stop? Why is it okay to discriminate against someone for being "from" or "in" a place, but not being "of" a place? WHat's the difference? Hard lines is all.

This is the very argument used by extreme racists to justify racists actions. It's a standard pattern. I know why it feels okay. But I think when you really look and say "oh wait, there is no honest, ethical reason to ever do this" it starts to make sense. In the INternet, where your IP is means nothing. Imagine if this was an in person shop and that you have a European passport means you are turned away and not allowed to shop. Or more specifically a Croatian one. Oh, you are a Croat? You can't shop here. You say "But I'm not a Croat, I just moved there and live there". Oh, well, too bad, we don't serve people who associate with Croats either.

Does that not feel racist? Is it legal? Yes, in the US. Is it okay? Never. Why do we excuse it on the Internet when it would disgust us in person?

@Mario-Jakovina said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

I think people are free to geoblock their sites if they think it is usefull for them and if they do not break any law etc.

Yes, in SOME cases, people are free to discriminate, that's correct (in the US where racism is heavily supported by the government.) It's not ethical, but it's legal IF you aren't a publicly traded company or in any way a function of the government and need to be available to the public. Which isn't much in a country where nearly every industry is eventually backed by the government (the US is heavily leaning towards government ownership and planned economy compared to more capitalistic countries.)

But that's not in question. Are people LEGALLY allowed to be racist? Yes. That's not the question.

@Mario-Jakovina said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

On the other hand, I do not find it "discriminatory" either.

It's literally a mechanism to discriminate by the perceived ownership of an IP address by a group of people. It's as discriminatory as it gets.

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

That'd make WAY more sense, and something I could even get on board with, providing there aren't any technical reasons that make much more sense such as those I listed initially.

There's never a technical reason. We've been discussing this for years. It's common IT knowledge that there is no technical reason to geo-IP block as it doesn't do what the name implies.

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

Or,

"This website is blocking every country in the world except the U.S., and their phone support also said it's due to the owners of the service having a huge prejudice against all non-U.S. countries."

So you are okay with saying it is racism, as long as we couch the verbage so to make it feel more palatable to sensitive people who are racist, and we say that they are racist, but we avoid the word to not hurt their feelings?

When do we care about hurting the feelings of people being racist? That seems crazy.

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

@Mario-Jakovina said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

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

https://gephardtdaily.com/

There is one example.

It is geo blocked in my country.
But I do not find it racist

Should we call it unnecessarily discriminatory (Instead of racist?)

No, I don't think so. Because fundamentally it is about race or the perception of race without any real alternative. When you see Americans as a race, as many Americans do, limiting anyone "except Americans" cannot be anything but racism. And no amount of "I don't see it that way" personally, changes the reality that that's how many Americans see being American (and mirrors how other countries are.) I don't think we should ever bow to the millenial "don't make people upset" mentality. Yes, I know it feels bad to admit that we are often surrounded by bad people, but we can't worry about acts of evil being ignored just because some scared American racist will be butt hurt over being called out. There's way too much "we can't make them feel bad" about this stuff in America. Man up America, put your big girl panties on and accept when you do bad things. Call it out. make it stop.

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

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

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

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

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

You are mistaking ancestry, ethnicity, culture, religion, nationality, and linguistic group with race.

Which of those you use to identify with is your choice. But are all different things.

So what race is someone who is mixed?

They get to choose... How does that even work?

Example?

Someone who is white and black. They almost always choose black. Why? How do they even have a choice?

They don't, when you "choose" you are choosing your ethnicity.

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

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

You are mistaking ancestry, ethnicity, culture, religion, nationality, and linguistic group with race.

Which of those you use to identify with is your choice. But are all different things.

Yes, but I'm only using DNA.

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

Jews could be anti-Arab

That would be language / cultural discrimination or prejudice.

You are mistaking ancestry, ethnicity, culture, religion, nationality, and linguistic group with race.

Race is a categorization based on shared physical traits. (black, white, asian, indigenous)

Exactly. Jew and Arab differ only on DNA, not on anything else. I think you are thinking of Judaism and Islam. Those are not traits of the DNA.

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

That would be religious / cultural (ethno-religious?) discrimination or prejudice.

It's also a race. MANY Jews are not culturally or religiously homogenous.

A great example of intra-racial racism is in common slurs. For example...

In Quebec, to be someone stupid is to be a newfie. Newfie is a racial slur against the slightly different racial group from Newfoundland. But it's been a slur so long, many people don't realize that that is what they are saying.

Or you might use the term vandal or vandalize. A racial slur against some Germans. But it is mostly used by other Germans. It's used by northern Germans as a slur against ones from the south. But as racial groups, they are separated by many thousands of years.

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

You may identify by your ethnicity (Scottish for example), but your race may be White.

Most people identify by their race, not their ethnicity. Or some combination. For example by race my wife is Italian and Irish. But by ethnicity she is just Italian.

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

I think that it's important to clarify that what you identify as and race are not the same things.

I can identify by nationality, ethnicity, or race. They are not same things.

You may identify by your ethnicity (Scottish for example), but your race may be White. (as an example, I don't know you)

Nationality is wholly different.

My nationality is American. That's clear cut. Your passport tells you this. It says nothing about you as a person. It's a legal thing.

Race is based on your DNA. It's who you are that no one can control. My race is predominantly, by no small margin, Swiss German. You can identify that by DNA. The chart you showed from 23 & Me or Ancenstry or whatever, is your racial information and nothing but racial. It can't determine anything else.

Ethnicity is your upbringing and culture. So for example, I was raised in a heavily Dutch influences, Swiss household. So my ethnicity is more heavily skewed towards Dutch than my DNA would suggest. But my ethnicity is also Swiss and Dutch.

Your race can never be changed. Your ethnicity is influenced by your life. So if I had been adopted by a family in Bogota and I was raised there as a local. My ethnicity would be Colombian. but my race would always be Swiss.

My kids are Swiss Italian by race. But heavily hispanic by ethnicity. Not fully, but partially whereas I am not.

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

But I consider my race to be White -- not German, English, or Scottish.

I assume it's because I've grown up in the U.S. and have learned to base my race off of that.

Right. You grew up in a German dominated country and are mostly German (Scottish is celtic, all the rest are Germans) that reclassified German as white about 80 years ago and has tried to make a point of making their white population unified (mostly, we suspect, as a means of banding together to retain a majority of more closely associated races as other races are more racial "distant.") That's a standard cultural trend over time.

If you lived in those individual countries, you'd see things probably a bit differently. But I also grew up in America and my background is shockingly close. however, I grew up one generation outside of a Swiss enclave and my family definitely didn't see ourselves as any closer to British as to Hispanic. Both were "other races". Not in a negative way, just "not Swiss". I grew up as Swiss German (not Swiss French as many are) with some Dutch and Scottish as "seasoning."

Both approaches exist commonly in the US. You get loads of people who see themselves as "American." But my wife's family is Italian and they'd never say American, they are absolutely Italian in every sense. Even though some of her family has been here since the Mayflower.

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

I don't know you personally, but I'd assume that I would say you are one of the 7-ish major races. None of which are Swiss, Dutch, or Scottish.

I agree that most people see a few racial top level categories. I don't agree that racism doens't exist between those categories. If you try to do that you dismiss the idea, for example, that Arabs could be anti-Jewish or that Jews could be anti-Arab at a racial level since they are the same "race" both top level and sub level group. Yet clearly, the world sees them as racially different.

The world has always seen Europe alone as having about seven major races... Celtic, German, Slavic, Hellenic, Latin, Iberian, and Magyar plus the tiny race that is in Finland, Estonia and the Basque country.

When we were kids the world was like "four major races". But who is in which one keeps changing and everyone has different opinions. But essentially everyone considered like Irish and Polish to be two different races (and they are in every meaningful way) and groups that have recently all been labeled as white have had millennia of racism between them.

You can't just wash away the responsibility that companies or people have for being racist by attempting to wipe away the human concepts of racism. You and I can have nice, logical discussions as to whether races are real, imaginary, useful, etc. BUt what matters for racism to exist is for people to perceive and detect a race to which they belong and races of other people. Race is a perception. So for most people, "other people" are another race even if they are genetically the same. Meaning, the average American knows no more about the average Canadian or the average Afghani or the average Somali and may easily equally see all as "not American" because they have racism from afar.

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

Do you honestly think Hulu is racist to the entire world except the U.S.

If it isn't clear...

Both I and the customer service rep at Hulu are saying... "Hulu sees America as a race and everyone else as inferior and blocks more than their licensed content, but violated the law to act as if they have gone out of business to both foreigners AND to Americans who travel and associate with foreigners." That Americans who we know see American as a race will then be racist should be the assumption and never a surprise.

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

I'm sure there are other ways to do it, like confirming real credit cards and addresses, but that can also be faked easily or just use someone else's to sign up, etc. Official country IDs (passport, drivers license, etc), but that'd be expensive to suppor

The degree to which one is trivial and the other is super hard for most people is extreme. There's no comparison. I bypass geo ip blocking by accident, constantly. ANd get blocked by accident, constantly. Easy to bypass is when someone bypasses it without even thinking. No intent, just... doesn't do the job it is meant to do.

Passport, driver's license, credit card... those all require legal fraud to work around.

You can't compare them.

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

So they implement geo-blocking, I'm assuming as a way to check a box to show the content owners they are actively doing "something" to prevent breaching their contracts, agreements, etc.

No, no semi-competent technical person could ever use geo blocking for that reason. Even if someone was that dumb, and all their management was that dumb, all they have to do is look at Netflix, Amazon, Disney (that owns them), BBC, Pluto, and on and on and go "oh shit, tha'ts NOT how it works, doh!"

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

That's not how it is at all.

Hulu doesn't own every show or movie they have available. They license them from the content owners which give them the right to stream that content but often come with restrictions, including where the content can be shown.

It's exactly how it is. Netflix, Amazon and all the other streaming services have the same licensing issues, often with the exact same programming, and not one does geo blocking. Only Hulu. ANd they restrict customer service, not just streaming. There's no possibility of making the argument you are trying to make because it goes far, far outside of their licensed content. And Hulu owns much of it, so licensing doesn't count either.

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.