For many people who use proxies for privacy reasons, their location is largely irrelevant. Obviously they need to be fast and accessible, so countries with poor internet infrastructure are not usually an option. For people who want to keep their connections as private as possible, the local laws are obviously an issue to. Generally places like Europe have mature and comprehensive privacy laws which mean that any data stored on servers is also protected. Other countries have little legislation and protection, which means that any logs or other data can be easily accessed.
However many of the people who use proxies and VPNs, simply don’t care about these issues – they simply use proxies to change their identity. A few years ago, everyone was treated pretty much the same when online. It didn’t matter if you were surfing the web from Cairo, New York, Tehran or Berlin – the experience was identical. This is no longer the case, for a variety of reasons your internet experience is heavily dependent on your physical location.
Take for example, that I send you a link to the latest BBC nature documentary which is streaming on BBC iPlayer. I am based in London and the programme works perfectly for me, however if you happened to open the link whilst in a different country – it wouldn’t work. This is because the BBC iPlayer application, arguably the greatest media website on the planet only works from a UK IP address. You can’t access it from any other country, without changing your identity. This video explains how it’s done – or watch this –
This is of course not an isolated example, in fact all the online UK TV stations are only accessible when used from the UK or using a British proxy.
This situation happens everywhere, all the US media sites do the same – you can’t access HBO, ABC, NBC or Hulu from outside the USA. French TV channels block non-French traffic, and the Germans do the same with their TV stations. Then you get big social sites like YouTube with hundreds of thousands of videos locked to specific countries too.
These are blocked for commercial reasons, either because of licensing issues for the content or simply so they can be sold in other countries perhaps as DVDs or CDs. But these restrictions don’t stop there, because along with commercial interests, there’s also a whole host of Governments and agencies actively blocking websites for political and social reasons. Increasingly countries are blocking access to content they feel is inappropriate for their citizens.
Of course this varies widely depending on the regime that is in charge. The Chinese block millions of sites for example, whereas some countries only block a handful. The trend though is that filtering and controlling access to the web is increasing globally irrespective or where you live. Just like monitoring in the name of fighting cyber crime and terrorism is also increasing too.