The EU has had to weaken its original unambiguous stance which held that geoblocking in all its forms was contrary to the spirit of a single market without boundaries between states. This purist position was espoused by EU digital commissioner Andrus Ansip after taking office late in 2014, immediately voicing his frustration about being unable to watch football matches in his native Estonia because of geo-blocking rules. Then in March 2015 disagreement at the top of the EU became public after Ansip reiterated his absolute opposition to geoblocking. This provoked his fellow commissioner Gunther Oettinger to insist that there was no rush to abolish location based restriction of online content. “We should not throw away the baby with the bath water”, Oettinger said in an interview with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at the time.

Since then the EU has concluded that Europe cannot be treated like the USA when it comes to restricting geoblocking for a variety of cultural, legal and commercial reasons. Oettinger touched on the cultural issue when he stated that he would like to examine what an end to geoblocking would mean for the various national film industries across Europe. While the USA is truly a single market united by a common language and relatively similar pricing across all states, the situation in Europe is totally different. There are more languages even than member states, while there are huge divergences in wealth with consumer spending power varying by a factor of 12 between the wealthiest nations such as Sweden or Luxembourg and the poorest like Romania or Greece. Furthermore some individual countries have fragile movie and TV production industries that would be highly vulnerable to open pan European rights negotiation. For this reason the European film business has flatly opposed an end to geoblocking.

Indeed as veteran UK media analyst Raymond Snoddy has pointed out, an end to geo-blocking with trans-European auctioning of rights being established would effectively price many national media groups out of the market. By corollary it would be good news for major international OTT providers like Netflix, as well as big operators such as Sky or Liberty Global, capable of bidding on a large scale for rights at a continental or even global level.

In the short term though most pay TV operators and broadcasters are opposed to an end to geoblocking, because at present segregating rights by state suits their business models. Sky does very nicely through being able to negotiate premium football rights for the UK only, while the BBC is able to meet its charter to provide free access to services in the UK while charging for them in the rest of Europe. Moves to end geoblocking of such content would face numerous legal obstacles.

The EU has also realized that the ending of geoblocking could have the unintended consequence of actually reducing the amount of online content crossing frontiers. As Snoddy again pointed out, rights holders might just sit on their online rights until the lucrative traditional broadcast rights, which might still be sold in the traditional country-by-country way, have expired. They would only then make the content available online.

Given these concerns it is not surprising that for the current public consultation running for 12 weeks from September 24th, copyright protected content is excluded, with comments confined to cases that are uncontroversial, such as exempting service providers from anti-geoblocking rules when these would conflict with national laws such as restrictions on making online betting services available.

It seems likely that when geoblocking laws do emerge in the EU they will be considerably watered down from the original proposals advocated by Ansip and others, allowing wriggle room with scope for varying interpretations.