I’m confused. I thought the Internet was intended to make the flow of information borderless as it were.
So why are there now Geo constraints? What the heck are they exactly? Why were they made? Who benefits from them and what purpose do they serve?
I’ve never encountered them previously when travelling but now seem to. Why is that? What’s changed?
)To be clear, I don’t mean the kind of restraints that some hotels put on their internet access, to keep every room in the hotel from streaming content, which would be unworkable in many places. That I can easily understand, especially in smaller hotels in non Western countries where service is often dodgy at best!)
You really need to be more specific, but if you are thinking of the general class of constraints I think that you are thinking of, it is because copyrighted material has different distributors in different parts of the world who have different distribution deals and/or release dates. That is what results in limitations on streaming video viewing and ebook purchases. This is nothing particularly new–there was region coding in DVDs back in the late 1990s. (There were solutions to that problem then, there are solutions to many of the type of problem I believe that you are talking about now. None of which I think I’d be allowed to talk about.)
tl;dr: Information wants to be free. Information peddlers want to be paid.
Heck going back further there is the copyright treaty and the publishers cartel that divided the English speaking world into UK and US dominions. Unless you lived outside the US or the UK you never really saw the effect of these - but you had a non-competitive agreement where publishers divided the world in two and maintained prices. Because it was an international deal it wasn’t illegal.
But as above. Content providers want their pound of flesh, and if the licensee in the country where you are is different to the country of the licensee where you are trying to obtain that content there will be expectation that there will be blocking strategies in place to drive the traffic through the licensee that is both expecting to get the revenue (ie advertising dollar) and will pay for the rights.
Here in Oz it is painful, cable in the form of Foxtel locks up a high proportion of sports and makes it impossible to access any niche event you might be interested in without signing up for a full sports fan package. Worse, they will often lock up a particular sport (America’s Cup for instance) and simply fail to provide the content at all - making it illegal and impossible to view an event even if you are prepared to pay.
Another example is the BBC. In the UK all owners of TVs - or devices that can stream live TV content - must pay a license fee that largely goes to fund the state owned TV and Radio company. Since it is the UK population that pays for the content they restrict the majority of content to be accessible from only within the UK. There is a constant war with VPN providers to fake access paths to allow those outside the UK access. There was an attempt to provide for paid access for some content outside the UK, but that never got anywhere, which is a pity.
In addition to the copyright issues already mentioned, there are various censorship laws in countries that haven’t fully bought into the free speech idea. For example, China, Saudi Arabia (most of the arab countries, for that matter), Malaysia all have laws prohibiting types of speech that are commonplace in other countries. Even in Germany display of swastikas is prohibited (porting ‘Castle Wolfenstein’ required a lot of work to remove every swastika from the game).
As for why it’s changed, governments have only recently started considering the internet as a serious communications medium. And the idea of a medium that can’t be controlled or easily suppressed terrifies some governments.
World of Warships replaced the swastika in the middle of the Nazi war ensign with a Maltese cross so the game could be distributed in Germany. Likewise, the swastikas on the deck of the Bismarkfor a while were changed. Also, mainly to not offend some countries in Asia, the Japanese ensign was made into a simple hinu maru. The developers for the game are in Saint Petersburg; the money goes to Cyprus.
As an example … For a long time, if you subscribed to Netflix in Canada, you could connect via a VPN to a USA location and watch whatever was available to US subscribers. When the Canadian duopoly wanted to set up their own streaming service, they complained and the copyright holders made Netflix change its policy to filter out known VPNs from accessing content. After all, why would anyone buy the Canadian rights to a movie if a significant number of viewers could pretend they were in the USA and watch it there? At the very least, it lowers the Canadian price the movie maker gets.
As another example, many higher-end firewall makers provide the ability to filter traffic by country or region - why would Joe’s Plumbing need to allow IP traffic from Romania or Nigeria? If a business is confident that disallowing certain countries won’t seriously affect operations, it is safer to block those countries. But again, VPN service could allow a way around that… but if it’s compromised infected machines, odds are they are not using VPN services.
To address this particular component of the question - no the Internet wasn’t designed to be borderless. It was designed to be resilient. It was designed to avoid centralised critical components and to be able to function when significant parts of it were destroyed or degraded, routing around failed or damaged parts. Unlike many other network designs it has no central control point, rather replicating critical elements.
In the early days of network censorship this gave rise to the saying, (by John Gilmore) “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
However, it is hard to attribute such lofty ideals to a network that was mainly designed to develop and prove network technologies that would survive in wartime, and funded by the DoD via ARPA (and hence the early name of ArpaNet.)