EU voted to end Geo Blocking!!

[setsunatenshi]

DonFerrari said:

Tulipanzo said:
An important first step, if not groundbreaking on its own. The Internet exists beyond borders, and everyone should be able to access it freely.

The major discussion will happen surrounding digital services, which have shown more propensity for geoblocking costumers (*cough* Netflix)
Legislation for content distribution is in dire need of an update. Still interesting times.

P.S. lol at DonFerrari for trying to make this sound bad

Yes laugh at me all you want also ask for more govern intervention it is always good and necessary.

Internet exist beyond borders sure, and several companies have multiple locations, and funny enough you can find different prices on different locations (even within the same country, state or city). So, sorry, but price isn't solely determined by the existence of boundaries.

You may not believe but long term demanding that companies offer a single solution to the whole EU may be bad for customers.

Ka-pi96 said:

Limiting content to regions also makes things cost more. I know here in the UK we are one of the worst off for that. We often have among the highest prices yet less content than regions like the US which gets things cheaper as well.

And it's quite easy to fix the licencing issue. If they're intent on completely ending geo blocking then they'd just make it illegal to sell region exclusive licences. You can licence the thing globally, or you can piss off.

I think you are making confusion. On this kind of conversation cost means what is internal for the company, what you are looking at is price being higher and value being lower (which sure is an issue... and a bigger issue is thinking that this law will make all content that is mandated to be offered at the same price to be the lower price).

It must be really good to live in these countries where you can summarize your thinking to only the possible good outcomes.

Nem said:

And why shouldn't it? Europe is a union. We have a single currency and we can freely buy things in one country or the one next door without any barriers. This barrier is therefore redundant and an unecessary obstacle and us, european consumers would benefit from it being teared down.

Btw, we are talking about europe, not the whole world. Thought i'd mention because you seem to have missed the beggining of the conversation and might be under the wrong impression. 

As I said before, your city is also a single one, still it's possible to go to 2 different stores of the same owner and see different prices... you know why? Because the cost to deliver the product in one place is different than the other and also the demand elasticity curve is different as well.

To mandate that companies practice a single price europe wide will make it that some places that got it lower will pay more and perhaps some places that paid more to pay less... there is very little reason to believe they would practice the lowest price available to all regions under new legislation.

I know it is talking exclusively about EU, ONU or any other supranational organization thank god still doesn't have supreme sovereign over the whole globe.

setsunatenshi said:
About damn time!

Though as someone mentioned before there are some loopholes still in place for specific countries.

I got burned once buying way back when COD Black Ops in the shop (for PC) and when I start the game all the menus were in Polish with no option to change to English or any other language (maybe Russian).

That's the biggest load of shit ever, basically if you're a foreigner you're just fucked.

I thought I learned the lesson, so I basically stopped buying any other games in physical media, instead I would just buy the more expensive international version for every single purchase. I did so with BF1 on origin, paid the price in Eur and the day it releases I get everything in Polish once again.

Lucky me that the customer support guy was actually a decent human and changed whatever settings were needed to get the "normal" version of the game. It had automatically switched all the language settings to Polish just because I had a Polish IP at the time.

So yeah... about fucking time this changes.

Because sure a product destined to polish market needs 25 different languages so you can buy in different countries ¬¬

torok said:

Yes, but you can't change the country of an account, you can only make a new one in a different country. Xbox Live allows you to change the country a few times per year.

Yes I understood the complaint of the guy, still that is a point he have to do to Sony or boycott them instead of seeking legislation about it.

@ bold: That's what you don't seem to understand, there's no "polish market", there's an European market.

 

It seems by several of your comments in this thread that you have some issue with consumer friendly EU regulations, which is puzzling to say the least as you're probably a consumer yourself, but most of all you're not an EU citizen nor do you live in the EU.

Feel free to correct me if I jumped to a wrong conclusion here.