Evan Elkins - Locked Out: Regional Restrictions in Digital Entertainment Culture

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Locked Out: Regional Restrictions in Digital Entertainment Culture

Evan Elkins

Evan Elkins

New York University Press

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Elkins, Evan, author.

Title: Locked out : regional restrictions in digital entertainment culture / Evan Elkins.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Series: Critical cultural communication | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018044166| ISBN 9781479830572 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479873876 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH : Multimedia systems | Interactive multimedia. | Digital media. | Entertainment computing. | Trade regulation.

Classification: LCC QA76.575 .E534 2019 | DDC 006.7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044166

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Imagine this happening to you when shopping. So reads the opening title of a hidden-camera video produced by the European Consumer Organization (BEUC) and set in an English bakery. As unsuspecting customers enter the establishment and place their orders, the cashier asks to see identification. The confused patrons hand over ID cards and passports to the cashier, who tells one woman that pain aux raisins and bread are unavailable to German and Bulgarian customers and charges Belgian and French customers different prices for the same product. He explains, Weve been doing this for a while. Its an industry standard practice. Titles onscreen ask, You wouldnt accept this in the physical world, so why should you accept it when shopping or watching content online? Then we see a hashtag: #endgeoblocking.

A second video, released by the European Commission, begins with narration by Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, who laments digital fragmentation in the continent: You can drive from Tallinn to Turin without once showing your passport, but you cant stream your favorite TV shows from home once you get there. During this, we see other members of the Commission experience the frustrations of a regionally restricted internet. Commission vice president Andrus Ansip tries to watch a Dutch documentary on YouTube, but he encounters the platforms This video is not available in your country screen. Another commissioner attempts to buy a book online (Investment for Dummies) and looks comically aghast when he realizes that the shipping charges will nearly double the total purchase price. Acting ability of the Commission members notwithstanding, the video puts forward a rather convincing representation of the hassles that come with a geographically segmented digital landscape. In response, Juncker says in the video that Europe should represent a digital single market rather than a series of fragmented spaces.

This choice of words is not an accident. Both videos were created and distributed online to promote a European Commission initiative called the Digital Single Market (DSM). Introduced in 2015 with the goal of knocking down digital trade borders among EU countries, the DSM in part proposed an EU-wide ban against the topic of this book: regional lockout. Regional lockout refers to technological mechanisms in digital media hardware and software that control entertainment medias geographic distribution: region codes in DVDs and video game consoles and geoblocking in on-demand services, for instance. Regional lockout functions through a logic of prohibition, blocking people in certain regions from accessing media platforms as a way of ensuring that digital distribution remains consistent with region-based licensing agreements and release schedules. As media consumers, we encounter it whenever we see that familiar This content is not available in your country message. With the DSM in place, no longer would a streaming video platform remain available only to certain European viewers.