Okay, but this causes me about 90% of my major annoyances. Seriously. It’s almost always these stupid country restrictions.
I was in UK. I wanted to buy a movie ticket there. Fuck me, because I have an Austrian ip address, because modern mobile backends pass your traffic through your home mobile operator. So I tried to use a VPN. Fuck me, VPN endpoints are blocked also.
I wanted to buy a Belgian train ticket still from home. Cloudflare fuck me, because I’m too suspicious as a foreigner. It broke their whole API access, which was used by their site.
I wanted to order something while I was in America at my friend’s place. Fuck me of course. Not just my IP was problematic, but my phone number too. And of course my bank card… and I just wanted to order a pizza.
The most annoying is when your fucking app is restricted to your stupid country, and I should use it because your app is a public transport app. Lovely.
And of course, there was that time when I moved to an other country… pointless country restrictions everywhere… they really helped.
I remember the times when the saying was that the checkout process should be as frictionless as possible. That sentiment is long gone.
I don’t use VPN generally, only in specific cases. For example, when I want to reach Australian news. Because of course, as a non Australian, I couldn’t care about local news. Or when American pages rather ban Europe than they would tell who they sell my data to.
Not OP, but as far as I know that's how it works, yeah.
When I was in China, using a Chinese SIM had half the internet inaccessible (because China). As I was flying out I swapped my SIM back to my North American one... and even within China I had fully unrestricted (though expensive) access to the entire internet.
I looked into it at the time (now that I had access to non-Chinese internet sites!) and forgot the technical details, but seems that this was how the mobile network works by design. Your provider is responsible for your traffic.
