This poster is not available in your country.

The Lazi Akademie decided to make another DIN A1 Poster contest. This time, the theme was "Integration". My idea was, making a text looking like a CRT monitor, saying "this poster is not available in your country". Both the vibe of "uncomfortably old" technology and some sort of matrix was what I was going for. Won the 2nd Prize with it!

The amount of unnecessary geolocation on most of the sites you visit is quite uncomfortable. Since I have lived in Germany in the past 2,5 years, I had the 'honor' to feel like I am receiving filtered content, based on my IP. From GEMA warnings on YouTube, to being force redirected from google.com to google.de without even being asked. Thanks, Google, but I am pretty sure, ".com" wasn't a typo. Worryingly, googling the same thing in the same language shows different results on .de compared to .com. Want to watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? Tough luck, his comedy is so edgy for Germany, the Daily Show site decided to make their site unavailable to the Germans. This is just one simple example out of many.

This happens worldwide though. See the Netflix and Spotify availability, for example. See how, more and more, entire websites become exclusively accessible to certain countries.

I was living under the assumption, the internet was exactly about freedom of information, regardless of where you access it from. Apparently, every other site now feels the compulsion to know where you come from so it can know what localized (and often incomplete) content it's going to end up forcing down your throat.

My suggestion is to use ZenMate to "fake" the country you are from, via proxy. After you have downloaded and installed the ZenMate extension, try watching the Daily Show with a German IP, or try listening to your favourite music, playing GEMA roulette (every time you find a song blocked by GEMA, you drink - it's a fast way to get drunk, the bad side is, you will get drunk in utter silence).

Nonetheless, it should be none of the websites' business to reorganize and change content availability, based on what country you access it from. The fact that you need to work around, and "pretend" to be in a different country, just to access the information you need, is in my eyes, just not supposed to happen. Information, especially on the internet ought to remain as free as possible. An attempt to limit access to information, based on the country you are online from is, in my opinion, very backward thinking. It's supposed to be the "worldwide web".

Check out my blog for other posts on tudy1311.com/blog