As I was putting the finishing touches on this book, I spent some downtime listening to the New York Times Popcast. On one episode of the pop-music news and discussion podcast, the assembled panelists were discussing the implications of musicians keeping certain songs off Spotify and other streaming music platforms. Although my aim was to pull away from the manuscript for a bit, the discussion kept circling back to some of the larger concerns I have been working through in this book. Toward the end of the podcast, host and Times music critic Jon Caramanica goes on a mini-rant:
I think the internet has spoiled us in a way, right? Like, we believe that we are entitled to a complete jukebox of all things; we believe that we are entitled to permanence . . . We believe that these are . . . the kind of God-given rights that the internet has given to us. And then we get a little bit haughty and testy, and we’re like, “Oh, that thing’s not on the internet anymore?” But the internet is equally as unreliable as any prior form of content distribution, whether it was print, or whether it was an LP, or an 8-track. The internet has holes, the internet is controlled . . . there are legal concerns, there are all these things that are brought to bear on what remains and what doesn’t remain . . . Why do we expect the internet to be better?1
Caramanica is not talking about geoblocking or regional lockout here, but he captures a question that has bubbled under the surface of much of this book. Why should we expect the internet to be a space of unfettered access when it is just as subject to regulations and material constraints as other media? Extrapolating this to regional lockout, we might ask why the internet would somehow be free from the spatial concerns that have shaped centuries of media before its arrival. Geography has been an inescapable reality throughout the history of media access, and the last few decades of digital dominance are no different. To think that digital media unbind us from regulated access is to buy into the tech and entertainment industries’ breathless hype.
Rather, I have argued throughout this book that regional lockout both reflects and shapes the world’s geocultural divisions. It does so in its effects on digital technologies’ affordances and capabilities, the distribution routes that media take around the world, and the ways media reinforce cultural capital and cultural differences at broad, transnational scales. Central to this claim is the idea that media function as a kind of cultural resource that people use for various reasons—to be entertained or comforted, to dissect and analyze, to negotiate their identities, to learn something about the world and the people in it, and so on. As a result, unequal distribution of these cultural resources can correspond with inequalities of cultural capital between broadly scaled geographic territories such as nations or regions—a condition that I have called geocultural capital. This argument has enabled an assessment of regional lockout that does not assume uniform global effects. After all, as Cameran Ashraf and Luis Felipe Alvarez León remind us, characterizing the internet as naturally open and geoblocking as a restriction on it presupposes a “binary open/closed model” that fails to recognize the internet for what it is: a heterogeneous set of networks and experiences functioning along a variety of different territorial logics.2
That the internet is a cluster of different practices and networks is apparent in the many different stakes and perspectives global institutions bring to bear on regional lockout. Consumers, consumer rights groups, regulators, and even media industry figures regularly pronounce that regional lockout is—or should be—dying. A spate of anti-geoblocking protests and pronouncements from the 2010s that we might call the “end of geoblocking” discourses illustrate the gap between a differentiated internet and one free of geographic regulation. Many of these discourses have emerged from initiatives like Europe’s Digital Single Market proposal explored in chapter 3, though their broader context is a series of global demonstrations on the importance of internet freedom (e.g., activism in favor of net neutrality, against private-sector and state censorship, and so forth). Coming from a variety of sources and perspectives, the “end of geoblocking” discourses blur the line between utopian hopes for an open, publicly oriented digital commons, a celestial jukebox where we can access anything at any time, and the internet as a potential landscape for borderless exchange and free-market capitalism. Such complexities are underscored by the fact that figures as different as European Pirate Party members and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings have both called for and celebrated the end of geoblocking, though to significantly different ends. While the Pirate Party has levied its critiques from a platform fighting for an open and free commons, information privacy, and intellectual property reform, Hastings’s CES keynote address (discussed in chapter 3) viewed geoblocking as an outmoded barrier to Netflix’s ambitions of global television dominance.3 Ultimately, there is a distinction between anti-geoblocking protests from people who hold out hope for a freer digital landscape and those from commercial entities who see a borderless internet as a possible space to expand their domain.
Whether prematurely pronouncing regional lockout’s death or calling for its swift end, the “end of geoblocking” discourses posit that the time has come to abolish the practice. However, such calls tend to treat geoblocking as a historical blip—an extended accident of media industries trying to integrate digital technologies into existing distribution practices and intellectual property rules rather than simply the newest manifestation of long-standing business models based on market segmentation and windowing. Such rhetoric sees the industrial abandonment of geoblocking as part of a natural evolution into an idealized, globally open mediascape rather than the more banal reality that it is an expedient practice of media industries attempting to enter into new global markets. Finally, they smooth over the fact that regional hiccups are in fact produced through a variety of means: poor infrastructure, national content regulations, variable pricing in different territories, and digital entertainment companies’ hesitance to expand into new markets too quickly. Such issues point to an even broader palette of interruptions and regulations that we might include under a more expansive rubric of regional lockout. Though such examples are beyond the scope of this book’s focus on digital entertainment distribution, some are discussed in the various essays in Ramon Lobato and James Meese’s volume Geoblocking and Global Video Culture. The book compiles a series of pieces from around the world—and in spaces not covered at length in this book, including China, Turkey, Malaysia, Iran, Cuba, and more—that illustrate how geoblocking operates throughout the Global South in ways both similar to and distinct from practices explored here.4 The heterogeneity of geoblocking means that its elimination is more a utopian ideal than a realistically attainable goal.
If regional lockout is thus woven into a complex, variegated global media environment, this book has also shown that it would be overly simplistic to characterize it as always repressive in nature (and, correspondingly, that pushing back against it is necessarily a form of counter-hegemonic resistance). It often is, and its roots in capitalist spatial management highlight its role as a mechanism of power. However, a more nuanced view of regional lockout can likewise help us tease out complexities and ambivalences in everyday media life. For one, I have shown how it might make more sense to think of regional lockout as productive of the shape of global media culture—for better and worse—than as a purely restrictive mechanism. In chapter 2, I illustrated how hardcore gamer culture arose in part out of a regionally restricted medium. Furthermore, the previous chapter showed that the nominally more open environment of region-free media can, in fact, produce other marginalizing impulses. In the last chapter, for instance, I was critical of how region-free DVD at times corresponds with the commodifying impulses of predominately masculine, Western collector cultures—media users who, in David Morley’s words, “are celebrating not so much a politics of difference as indulging their own sense of the picturesque.”5
Even in offering this critique, though, Morley acknowledges the possibility that media might engender a cosmopolitanism geared toward accepting and appreciating difference.6 Region-free media can quite literally set conditions for this kind of openness by enabling users to engage media culture from other parts of the world—hence its particular social value as a cultural resource. This book thus ends by underlining the premise that media can still encourage substantial forms of cosmopolitanism marked by an interest in diversity, empathy with people from across borders and cultures, and shared global cultural citizenship. In her writing on ethnicity and diasporic television, Marie Gillespie lays out the stakes here: “The very coexistence of culturally diverse media is a cultural resource. It engenders a developed consciousness of difference and a cosmopolitan stance. It encourages young people to compare, contrast, and criticize the cultural and social forms represented to them by their parents, by significant others present in their daily lives and by significant others onscreen.”7 Although not always used in this way, region-free media make it easier for consumers to experience the cosmopolitanism-via-film that Charles Acland calls “felt internationalism.”8 Acland is writing about Canadian film audiences primarily, but across a variety of media contexts—Canadian filmgoers, Venezuelan gamers, Swedish Spotify listeners—felt internationalism is bound by a sense that we are participating in something that stretches beyond our own, graspable experience.
Whatever terminology and framework one prefers—Acland’s felt internationalism, Gillespie’s consciousness of diversity, Henry Jenkins’s pop cosmopolitanism—each suggests that foreign media hold possibilities for encountering and appreciating difference. This can serve as a reminder for media educators that a cosmopolitan perspective can be encouraged in the classroom—something that Jenkins discusses explicitly at the end of his essay on pop cosmopolitanism.9 Here, region-free media become useful for students and teachers alike looking to access media culture from abroad. A 2001 Washington Post story about DVD region codes illustrates this by telling the tale of a foreign-language student at Cornell who purchased a region-free DVD player in order to watch Russian films. Later, the article quotes an Atlanta-based electronics retailer who lists language students as one of the three major markets for region-free DVD players (the other two being the populations discussed in the previous chapter: “immigrants who want to watch movies from their home countries” and “foreign-film enthusiasts”).10 Indeed, scholars and practitioners from a variety of educational disciplines and levels have written about the analytical and practical problems that DVD region codes bring to their own work. For instance, Peter Ecke and Matthew Kayahara have each pointed to some of the issues that DVD region codes raise for foreign language and translation studies specifically, with Kayahara explaining that “regions which do not have sizable markets of a given language group will not have translations in that language released in that region.” As a result, “it makes it rather difficult . . . for an audiovisual translation theorist in Canada to study, say, the Czech translation of The End of the Affair, since that subtitle track is available only on the region 2 DVD, and Canada is in region 1.”11 One consequence of regional lockout, then, is that it can foreclose opportunities for students and users to develop knowledge and competency steeped in awareness and appreciation of foreign media.
This is a problem for film and media researchers and teachers, particularly those who adopt a transnational emphasis in their classrooms or in their research. Furthermore, consider how regional lockout affects the media libraries and archives that offer researchers, teachers, and students access to global media culture. As Jason Puckett summarizes from a librarian’s perspective, DRM “creates intentional and artificial information usage barriers. In doing so, it compromises libraries’ mission of providing free access to information.”12 Such concerns extend from DRM in physical media to online geoblocking. We might envision, for instance, a professor in Mexico City teaching about the global distribution of telenovelas yet unable to access Hulu’s library of Spanish-language programs. In an essay on YouTube and pedagogical media practice, Ted Hovet discusses the potential for students to use the platform to recontextualize and make sense of film clips.13 However, certain channels are geoblocked around the world, again limiting student access. Additionally, regional lockout affects more than just the library of content available to educators. For educators teaching courses on new media, algorithmic culture, digital platforms, or the materiality of media, these platforms’ interfaces may be off-limits due to geoblocking. Of course, showing American students the effects of regional lockout firsthand can itself be instructive in communicating the disconnections that still exist in our nominally connected world. It offers a space for students to reflect on the private-sector and state-based forces that shape media access.
Still, media educators should have the choice to circumvent regional lockout systems in order to access media from across region-locked borders or illustrate the conditions and experiences of media consumption from other parts of the world. In some cases, US media educators are protected legally by exemptions from the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules (as stated by the Copyright Office and the Library of Congress). The fair use guidelines published by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest film and media studies scholarly organization, inform us that these exemptions allow media educators (though not students) to bypass DRM on media owned by a departmental library.14 While these guidelines do not discuss region-coded media in particular, it seems that the anti-circumvention exemption would enable media educators to bypass regional lockout in particular instances. Given the ambiguities that still exist, however, region codes and geoblocking may require scholars to engage in legally murky terms of service–violating circumvention practices in order to access material for teaching and research. In her writing on geoblocking and the BBC iPlayer, media studies professor Christine Becker discusses the ensuing frustrations not just for fans but also for educators. In doing so, she echoes a common refrain of media users frustrated by regional lockout: “As someone who researches and teaches British TV, I would happily pay the license fee if given the opportunity to do so.”15 If legal (or at least industrially authorized) options are not available, we may have to make do through alternative means. Although not writing about educators per se, Lucas Hilderbrand helps make this case when he argues that bootlegging is an ethical decision, one that helps preserve and open up access to media.16 We may not want to break the law, but a mandate to make global culture available to students overrides the need to preserve media industries’ distribution routes.
Hilderbrand’s invocation of ethics points to the broader stakes of regional lockout and its circumvention. If media offer opportunities for cross-cultural connection, this book has pointed to conditions of digital technologies that defeat such possibilities. In his book Media and Morality, Roger Silverstone helps us to understand the consequences of this defeat and where we—as consumers, scholars, activists, and practitioners—might go from here. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, he characterizes our broader media environment as a “mediapolis,” a public “space of media appearance” where “contemporary political life increasingly finds its place . . . and where the materiality of the world is constructed through (principally) electronically communicated public speech and action.”17 Crucially, he sees the mediapolis as a moral space marked by “judgments of inclusion and exclusion.”18 Ideally, the global public space of the media would present the world’s inhabitants, cultures, and art forms to us in ways that enable an appreciation of this plurality—that bring about the kinds of cosmopolitan perspectives described above. Usually, it fails at this.
Pointing toward a solution, Silverstone proposes that the best way to build a globally inclusive mediapolis is through the development of media literacies that emphasize an ethical commitment to diversity and global citizenship. As he suggests, such media literacies are antithetical to forms of regulation that follow commercial and market logics. This contrast, between cross-cultural connection and commerce-driven regulation, exists at the heart of regional lockout. While numerous institutions have turned to regulation as a way of ensuring that our media operate in certain capacities, Silverstone argues that regulatory regimes based in competitive market logics are insufficient to create the conditions under which the mediapolis can shape a more just, inclusive world. Even some of the commercial and regulatory initiatives against regional lockout discussed throughout this book (Netflix’s “Everywhere” campaign, the EU’s Digital Single Market) privilege commercial enterprise over cultural pluralism. If entrenched powers see media commerce and regulation as ways of serving corporate bottom lines or state-based regulatory systems rather than methods of encouraging media diversity, then regional lockout will exist at odds with media systems built on an ethics of difference.
This is where the ethical questions of circumventing regional lockout come back into the conversation. If, as Silverstone argues, viewers and regulators alike have a moral obligation to interrogate and experience media as a space of global appearance, the conditions required to fulfill these obligations are often out of reach because of dominant regulatory regimes. Therefore, circumventing these mechanisms can involve a particular ethical stance in relation to the technology. Anti-DRM activists and hackers—including members of the anti-geoblocking Pirate Party described above—subscribe to what Hector Postigo calls a “hacker ethic.”19 Postigo quotes a hacker credo first articulated in 1984 by journalist Steven Levy illustrating that this ethic is marked not only by transparency and free information, but also the importance of accessing “anything that might teach you about the way the world works.”20 Even if this quotation does not respond directly to regional lockout or even DRM, it presages not only the similar questions of ethics that come up in discussions of regional lockout’s circumvention, but also the stakes of circumvention as a way of learning about the world that surrounds us. Indeed, one scholarly analysis of the ethics of internet users posting the DeCSS decryption code (which circumvents the DVD’s CSS encryption) argues that we need to keep in mind the users’ political motives and geographic location: “DeCSS posters from nations without anti-circumvention laws, or with laws that arguably permit non-commercial DeCSS posting, may consider themselves ‘global citizens’ resisting larger transnational institutions or legal trends rather than national-level laws and legal rulings.”21 Circumvention, here, raises the question of whether we orient ourselves through the media as national or global citizens. Through an alignment among global citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and the practice of hacking and circumventing regional lockout systems, we can envision possibilities for technically unauthorized but ethically and politically progressive media practices.
In striking out against regional lockout, activists and educators can and should move beyond a line of argument that sees lockout’s elimination as merely one part of a broader movement toward internet freedom and openness. While this can be a good, productive mode of attack, it has the potential to be incorporated into tech-corporate ideals of an open internet as a space for the expansion of capital. Rather, anti-regional-lockout activism and region-free media education should start from a place that recognizes media as resources we use to open ourselves up to global difference. Looking ahead, this will become particularly important in a world where media are at once becoming more mobile but where global intercultural connections are increasingly threatened by the walls, borders, and barricades of reactionary nationalism. Arguments based in libertarian, individualist notions of freedom or abstract infrastructural openness are insufficient on this front. Anti-lockout activism must be steeped in a consciousness and appreciation of difference rather than the market-driven branding strategies of “media everywhere” illustrated at times in this book. In short, a critique of regional lockout requires pushing for media systems that allow us to appreciate global cultural production in all its diversity.