Antitrust: e-commerce sector inquiry finds geo-blocking is widespread throughout EU|European Commission

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Companies get away with practices which go against the single market principles. Hopefully we will get rid of geo-blocking for goods, services and, above all, audiovisual content.

As to the supporters of geoblocking, who claim that, for instance, BBC would be exposed to huge losses if geoblocking was not allowed, I don’t think so. Do you get geoblocking in the USA? Either you consider every tiny European country a self-contained universe, with firewalls for anything going in or out – a collection of North Koreas of sorts, or you consider that there is a single market, with different languages and submarkets, with very few partitions. The Farages, Kaczyńskis and Le Pens of this world dream of their little kingdoms where they can bamboozle people with their rhetoric and will find any excuse to rebuild old walls and create new ones. Valiantly supported in their endevour by people making a fortune exchanging our hard-earned money into other currencies, charging us several times over for the same content or preventing us from accessing content in our own language if we live a few hundred Km away from our home country and making a mint if we make a phone call or access our email outside our country. I know which side I choose. And BBC could make some real money charging for its content when accessed abroad, rather than try to block all of it: they have a desirable product, they should market it, instead of blocking it just because there is a conventional border designed on a map somewhere.

Source: European Commission – PRESS RELEASES – Press release – Antitrust: e-commerce sector inquiry finds geo-blocking is widespread throughout EU

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