Internet Marketing Becoming More And More Racist
- 8 Comments
You would really be lucky two years ago, if you found news about major website blocking other countries. Now, almost every month some major website is blocking countries and I think thats just bullshit and racist! I mean WWW after all still means “WORLD WIDE WEB” and not SWW “Some Wide Web”. Sites like YouTube, Amazon, Veoh, Ebay and now also GoDaddy are blocking access to certain countries , and I just want to know why? Is there a good reason for GoDaddy to block China? I really wonder who is the dumb ass that came up with that idea! GoDaddy is NOT the only registrar people can register websites with, after all GoDaddy prices are sky rocking and too expensive for what you get.
Reason GoDaddy blocked China from registering domain names is because they don’t want them to register Olympic Names.
The current blocking may be related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. China’s sport authority has banned the issuing of Internet domain names based on the country’s Olympic gold medal-winning athletes to anyone but the medalists themselves, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The General Administration of Sport (GAS) provided the CNNIC with a full list of China’s Olympic team prior to the Games opening on Aug. 8, and had registered all available domain names for athletes in Chinese characters and in Pinyin. Those who had already registered before the GAS order could not keep the the domain names any more, they were forced to give it to the medalist “as a gift”.
Sorry, but I hate racism of any kind!
Usually they block them to comply with that countries government.
They don’t just do it willy nilly! and if they did it wouldn’t be because their racist!
Ultimately all these companies are out to make money and blocking a whole country would put a serious dent in their income.
@Han: I understand that, but why suddenly websites started to block countries from visiting? So that means if you move to let say my home country Slovenia, wouldn’t you be pissed that you can’t watch Veoh videos but you could if you move back to USA?
I’d be pretty miffed yeh – but you have to assume they’ve done it for a reason. I doubt they sat around a meeting table and said, “you know I had a crap holiday in Slovenia, lets block all access from that miserable country to our website! bwahahahaha”
Its not really a recent trend its only because its been brought to the mainstream its become an issue – china’s firewall has been up for years. Most times I suspect companies are covering their arses before they can be blocked by the government in question – as a sort of (strange) way of getting into their good books!
use a vpn
I pay a TV licence I wanna watch bbc iplayer in the US!
I hate it that I can’t watch or listen to stuff I’ve PRODUCED while living in the Philippines. The piracy is rampant here, but they’ll always find a way around it.
I can understand mild hesitance to sell domains to restrictive countries like China, but still don’t see reasonable grounds. Maybe I’m missing something.
@Han: Veoh’s reason for blocking over 100 countries is because they wanted to point advertising more towards USA and because other countries did not give them much visitors.
How is GoDaddy the bad guy here when everything points to China doing the blocking, and China being the one instituting the domain registration rules on their citizens? That’s not racism, that’s government oppression/censorship.
To quote that same blog that you quoted the CNN quote from: “A screen copy of the command ‘tracert http://www.godaddy.com‘ shows that the problem is a router inside China Telecom.”
Source: http://www.moon-blog.com/2008/08/godaddy-blocked-in-china.html
Most of the cases you seem to be referring to are cases of countries blocking access to services due to censorship, not services blocking countries due to racism. While cases of racism in marketing exist, and while even GoDaddy does many things I disapprove of, I think you are off base on this one.
Sorry, “quoted the CNET quote”, not CNN, up there.
Race and/or ethnicity is not in any way a determining factor in these cases, consequently racism is not the proper term. Xenophobia might be involved, but the offending parties would be the countries requesting the bans not the ISPs and info services. Your ire is misplaced, LiveCrunch. The fault is not with our technorati, but lies at the feet of the political powers that be in the “banned” countries who fear that political and intellectual freedom will weaken their power. It’s the old “How you gonna keep um down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paris” syndrom. These guys represent some pretty dreary farms.