[ascar]

In general I totally agree with your sentiment. As you seem quite knowledgeable in the subject I want to nitpick your choice of words in your closing statement.

> any company that uses geo-IP location to serve me pages specific to that locale

A company should serve you content based on your geographic location. That's exactly what "localization" is for. E.g. the content should be adapted to local regulations and law whenever necessary and it makes total sense to do that based on the visitors physical location and geo-IP is often the best approximator you have for that. What should be adapted to user's choice is language.

[justinmayer]

I firmly disagree with all of the above. If a site absolutely needs to know where I am in that moment, they can ask me, and I will decide where I am for the purposes of that particular site.

To pick one of a myriad of examples, I often buy software, books, etc. via the web. I don't need sites to assume I want to pay in Euro just because my IP address in that moment happens to be associated with a European IP address block. Paying with my home currency is often much easier. I should not be forced to use a VPN just to avoid this silliness.

I understand where you are coming from, but using IP addresses to determine what "locale" to use is simply not a good practice, and not just for language determination.

[ascar]

Well, your example will be in many cases against the law. Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries catalogue I want to watch. A website isn't allowed to choose which VAT to charge and who they owe it to. In an Arabic country you might not be allowed to serve images of women in swimwear (or other revealing images). There are many more examples like that and the applicable law is usually based on your physical location at that point in time (i.e. the jurisdiction you are in). While I agree IP isn't the best choice, it is often the best available and letting the user just choose these things is in many instances simply illegal.

[denton-scratch]

> Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries catalogue I want to watch.

That has nothing to with the choice of language. Unless you're using some antique HTTP server that doesn't support it, use Accept-Language.

If you have reasons for filtering content based on geographic location, and you absolutely can't trust the user to tell you, perhaps you shouldn't be serving content over HTTP; the IP address is a poor proxy for geographic location. It's perfectly posible to buy an IP block in one country, and have it routed to another.

> In an Arabic country you might not be allowed to serve images of women in swimwear (or other revealing images).

If you're running your HTTP server in a Moslem[0] country, perhaps you shouldn't be serving those images to anyone. But if not, then it's your user's responsibility to comply with local law.

If the diversity of content that the internet brings is unacceptable to some nation, they can either try to do without the internet (good luck with that!), or try some kind of filtering regime like the Chinese have set up.

> the applicable law is usually based on your physical location at that point in time

"Your", i.e. the site user's location. But if you're geared-up to charge VAT in the first place, then you're able to handle things like delivery addresses in EU countries. At any rate, if your site visitor fails to pay VAT on purchases, it's the user that has committed VAT fraud, not the server operator. So operators should simply ask users where they are, for those purposes.

[0] Not all Moslems are Arabs, and not all Arabs are Moslems.

[ascar]

> That has nothing to with the choice of language

That is exactly my point. Localization isn't about choice of language and thus the choice of words of GP was wrong. He was talking about language, translation or internationalization. Localization is about adapting your website to a different local target market. The whole premise is of course that the company wants to do business in that area and then they have to follow the local law.

My comment was a response to the GP stating he wants it to be the users choice to set their location, but a company doing business in different countries can't just allow the user to choose with which entity it wants to interact through their website (Netflix being a prime example).

I explicitly said Arabic and "might" as I only know it's a problem in some countries in that geographic region, which is probably due to religious reasons, but I explicitly didn't want to bind it to religion. The biggest Muslim country is afaik Indonesia and they are not nearly as strict in these regards except for maybe the Aceh region.

[kps]

My ISP covers two jurisdictions with different primary languages. IP geolocation often places me in the wrong one.