In this case a site is geoblocking. It's an affiliate station is Wisconsin, serving up local news. Sites have been using things like MaxMind and blanket blocking entire regions long before Cloudflare.

If you've run a site like that, pretty soon you realize 100% of the traffic that hits you from Asia, Russia, the Middle East and even Eastern Europe / the Baltics is exploit detection scripts and is just noise in your logs. Okay, 99.999999% as once every decade something ends up on HN and gets a broader audience.

▲

isodev 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This is such a narrow PoV and I don't see how it relates to Cloudflare currently being de factor gatekeeper for every web properly of consequence.

What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible? What about locals who travel? What about locals who share links with others?

	▲	llm_nerd an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You brought up Cloudflare, when in reality this site went into their caching services configuration and purposefully enabled geofencing restrictions. They could have done this a million ways, and Cloudflare is basically irrelevant to this conversation, and is utterly fungible. >What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible Because you don't want the burden of far away users who will never represent a penny of income for your content? This is a weirdly entitled comment. Quite aside from certain countries disproportionately account for malicious traffic, often there are legal issues that come into play as well. This is why many regional sites block EU locations because they don't want the compliance costs for users that aren't their base.