Imgur is one of the more annoying UK geoblocks because they persist it with cookies, so if you want to view something you can’t just switch to VPN for a second without also changing browser sessions.
Reddit is worse… you can’t even view someone’s profile if they’ve ever submitted a post labeled NSFW.
Why would they do that? (Not a rhetorical question, just curious). It would suffice to block UK IPs for compliance, if visitors use a VPN to circumvent that Imgur would get more traffic and more ad revenue. No reason to put extra work into blocking those users.
Gives them proof they did their best to "protect minors" even if they circumvented the GeoIP rule: someone trying and realising it still does not work might get X percentage to not bother further thinking there was something smarter at play and not just GeoIP (which there is).
Could be for performance? Basically cache the group lookup result into a signed cookie that can be checked at the edge rather than needing to do a geoip lookup for every request.
Maybe, maybe not. It'll be signficiantly harder for the EU to target decentralised services with no organisation behind them. It'll be far easier for them to put every major tech site which accepts VPN traffic into the box of organisations they can still fine. I'm not entirely sure the wider population will really care all that much once the dust settles. The internet works in China, and people are happy with it, and while we can agree that is probably what you'd call th dark age, you'll need significantly public opposition to do anything about it. I think we'll sadly see most major tech sites adopt whatever age verification tool the EU builds. They did with all the various form of payment system though this was obviously helped along with the API provided by companies like visa.
Honestly you could probably even use the 0 cost back charge that visa has, which is used by some finance services to verify that you are who you say you are through the visa connection to your national digital identity.
> I think we'll sadly see most major tech sites adopt whatever age verification tool the EU builds.
No, we won't. Tech doesn't care about users. We saw this when Valve delisted thousands of games in Germany instead of implementing the (completely anonymous) age verification process we've had built into our ID cards for years.
They do care about money though, and there is a difference between delisting thousands of games in Germany and losing access to the EU market entirely.
Reddit is worse… you can’t even view someone’s profile if they’ve ever submitted a post labeled NSFW.