by Calvin Robinson on September 8, 2010.

It seems like more and more websites and applications are becoming region restricted. Whether it be Hulu, Pandora, Netflix or Vevo the reason is always the same: Intellectual Property / Copyright / Licensing. However you want to word it, it’s all about the fat cat Film and Music studios having control over their content.

Control. Nobody has control over digital goods and those who believe they do are quite simply naive. Control doesn’t equal revenue anymore – far from it.

Think about it. All of the lovely websites/web apps I mentioned above are only accessible from the United State, that means people all over the world are forced to find alternative methods of accessing the brilliant content they provide. This is why piracy is thriving more than ever.

The control they enforce, often to prevent piracy, is in fact a catalyst for piracy. Instead, imagine if they opened up their platforms to a Worldwide audience. Whether their services are subscription based or advertisements, it doesn’t matter – they’d still be earning a hell of a lot of money.

People don’t want to pirate, people just want to watch good TV shows or listen to popular music. If you won’t provide a legitimate option, people will default to the more questionable options. It’s common sense!

At the moment the best way to access all of this content is to acquire a US VPN account – whether paid or free (with ads). This will allow users to browse the Internet as if they were in the USA, meaning you can log in to Hulu, Pandora, Netflix, Vevo and the rest, watch/listen to their great content while providing them with subscription/advertising revenue at the same time. We shouldn’t have to circumvent the system in order to do this. Especially when the only other option is Bit-torrent/Usenet.

The users are missing out on content, the fat cats are missing out on profit, everyone’s worse off this way. Let’s stop restricting content based on IP addresses and see what happens.

Why should the Internet be segregated? It didn’t used to be this way and in my opinion it’s not supposed to be this way.