The term is most commonly associated with its use to restrict access to premium multimedia content on the Internet, such as films and television shows, primarily for copyright and licensing reasons.
One notable example is the Ligue contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme et Union des étudiants juifs de France v. Yahoo!
This can include online gambling,[14] and various international websites blocking access to users within the European Economic Area due to concerns of liability under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
[18] In response to complaints over the quality of domestic coverage by NBC, along with a requirement for viewers be a subscriber to a participating pay television provider in order to access the online content, a large number of American viewers used VPN services to stream foreign online coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympics and 2014 Winter Olympics from British and Canadian broadcasters.
In 2009, Venezuela subsidized the launch of the communications satellite Venesat-1, in part to amplify Telesur's programming by enabling it to avoid geo-blocking efforts by DirectTV, an American company.
[8][18][19][24] Unlike manually-configured VPN services, Global Mode was implemented passively at the ISP level and was automatically activated based on a whitelist, without any further user intervention.
[25] The legality of circumventing geo-blocking to access foreign video services under local copyright laws is unclear and varies by country.
[9][24][27][8][7][28] Leaked e-mails from the 2014 Sony Pictures hack revealed statements by Keith LeGoy, Sony Pictures Television's president of international distribution, describing the international usage of Netflix over VPN services as being "semi-sanctioned" piracy that helped to illicitly increase its market share, and criticizing the company for not taking further steps to prevent usage of the service outside of regions where they have licenses to their content, such as detecting ineligible users via their payment method.
[9][24] On 14 January 2016, Netflix announced its intent to strengthen measures to prevent subscribers from accessing regional versions of the service that they are not authorized to use.
[36][37][38] The European Union has approved the Regulation on Measures to Combat Unjustified Geoblocking and Other Forms of Discrimination Based on Citizenship, Place of Residence or Location of a Person in the Internal Market, which entered into force on 3 December 2018.
The companies accused the ISPs of facilitating copyright infringement by violating their exclusive territorial rights to content in the country, and misrepresenting the alleged legality of the services in promotional material.
At least two smaller providers (Lightwire Limited and Unlimited Internet) announced that they would pull their VPN services in response to the legal concerns.
However, CallPlus, the parent company of Slingshot and Orcon, objected to the claims, arguing that the Global Mode service was "completely legal", and accused the broadcasters of displaying protectionism.