[clowd]

I wouldn't go so far as useless, but they frequently exhibit significant inaccuracy, no matter which vendor/service you use. It's not unusual for me to query 7 APIs and be told the user is in 7 different cities spanning 5 states. At least there's usually a quorum at the country level. Given the market ($$$) for IPv4, this feels like it's only getting worse as more blocks of IPs are being sold, leased, transferred, even between continents/RIRs and the geo providers are always a few steps behind.

For the IP posted above, I have 3 providers claiming it's in Sao Paulo, 3 who says it's in Joburg (this is as accurate as anyone's going to get right now) and one says it's in Chicago! If I'm trying to do something with these results programmatically, I don't have a majority or a plurality to pick as a "winner" and I have to try weighting specific providers, which is a whole new mess.

Anyway, there's a good idea brewing in RFC8805 but it'd require pretty much every AS to play along.