Compared to most Geekzone members my technical know-how is modest but compared to many of my friends I am an expert. Recently an American acquaintance resident in NZ was complaining about Yahoo localisation and the fact that he could not seem to find any way to get to the US financial news page (finance.yahoo.com). I said I would look into it and I also could not find any way to bypass the .nz redirect. I am not a Yahoo user but as far as I can tell there is nothing comparable to Google.com/ncr.

 

 

This strikes me as foolish and also rather petty. While looking into it I ran into many complaints from people around the world about the same kind of thing and how irritating it is to be served up web pages in languages you can’t read just because you happen to be stationed in a foreign country for six months. I wonder about the sense of those responsible for such policies. Have they never heard of the global economy? It seems pretty stupid to just blindly assume everyone with a national IP address only wants to see stuff related to that culture. I assume the reason is to cram local advertising down the gullets of everyone within reach, but it still seems pretty short-sighted to me. Irritating your customers is hardly the way to win hearts and minds.

 

 

Anyway, I wonder what others think about this. Am I missing something? Forced localisation (with no option to bypass it) is both stupid and self-defeating, because it is so easy to get around. Of course I quickly found an on-line public proxy in the US and explained to my friend how to use it in two very easy steps. So what is the point of preventing people from doing that in the fist place? It just makes them mad.