We are always happy to work with large technology enterprises and streaming platforms, not necessarily to sell, but to share insights, data, and practical advice. We observe the entire internet through active measurements, and we are open to co-publishing research when it benefits the broader ecosystem.

Google/GCP is top of mind for me due to a recent engineering ticket. Some of our own infrastructure is hosted on GCP, and Google’s device-based IP geolocation model causes issues for internet users, particularly for IPv6 services.

From what we understand, when a large number of users from a censored country use a specific VPN provider, Google's device-based signals can bias the geolocation of entire IP ranges toward that country. This has direct consequences for accessibility to GCP-hosted services. We have seen cases where providers with German-based data centers were suddenly geolocated to a random country with strict internet censorship policies, purely due to device-based inference rather than network reality. Our focus is firmly on the geolocation of exit-node IPs, backed by network evidence.

https://community.ipinfo.io/t/getting-403-forbidden-when-acc...

We are actively looking to connect with someone at Google/GCP, Azure/Microsoft and others who would be willing to speak with us, or directly with our founder.

Our community consistently asks us to partner more deeply with enterprises because we are in constant contact with end users and network operators. To be honest, we do not even get many questions or issues. We are partners with a large CDN company, and I get one message about a month, which usually involves sharing evidence data and not fixing something.

From a large-scale organization's perspective, IP geolocation should not be treated as an internal project. It is a service. Delivering it properly requires the full range of engineering, sales, support, and personnel available around the clock to engage with users, evaluate evidence, and continuously incorporate feedback.

> From what we understand, when a large number of users from a censored country use a specific VPN provider, Google's device-based signals can bias the geolocation of entire IP ranges toward that country.

Yep, this is a known effect.

How it seems to work is: Google uses Android phones as data harvesting probes. And when it sees that a lot of devices in a given IP range pick up on GPS data, Wi-Fi APs or cell tower IDs that are known to be located in Iran, and possibly other cues like ping to client devices or client device languages, timezones, search request contents, then the system infers "there's a network wormhole there with Iran on the other end", and the entire IP range grows legs and drifts towards Iran.

The owner of those IP addresses can mitigate the issue, mostly by shaping traffic or doing things to Google's system, but I know of no way for anyone else to do it.