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I live in Taiwan.
I was asking a question on Super User concerning Access Denied problem when accessing http://www.cvs.com
One of the user from Netherlands made a comment that he is having the same problem. I am not sure if he has the same network/browser problem that I am having or actually I should blame this problem to CVS.
I am wondering if there are commercial web sites in the US who are blocking access from outside US?
There are plenty of websites that are only accessible from within the US. Most of them being video on demand or video rental companies that let you download content and the law does not permit them to do so outside the country hence the blocking.
Some webmasters or companies do not want business from outside the country so having visitors from abroad just eats away their resources and the find it easier and cheaper to block outside traffic.
This is also true for some non commercial websites. Some websites block certain countries to prevent spam attacks. There are many such examples. IP level blocking is very easy to do and hardly takes 5 mins to set up. IP range lists for every country are freely available on the internet.
What can you do?
Use a proxy like hidemyass and use a US IP address.
Source : I am a server admin myself.
After looking at every network request, I figured out what causes CVS to deny access for me:
The primary language of my browser was not English.
After I changed it from Russian to English, I could access CVS again; thus, looks like they deny access based on your preferred browser language.
Since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force, some sites outside the EU refuse to serve their content to IP addresses associated with Europe. Last summer, I was unable to load a news story from a small newspaper in the US when I was in Bosnia and Herzegovina. (I do not remember what newspaper it was; I found the article through an internet search.) The page I received instead of my story indicated that this was because of the GDPR, even though Bosnia is not in the EU and therefore not subject to the GDPR.
I believe it is when I am using the Tor browser and the country of origin is not the key item. Of note, CVS also only wants registered Twitter users who are followers to see their tweets. So, I expect this is about a U.S. company wanting to be able to track potential and current customers rather than welcome open access.
