As of this morning Wowhead is no longer available in Serbia:
We’ve discontinued servicing users from your location and are thereby preventing access to any of the websites owned and operated by ZAM Network, LLC DBA Fanbyte
This decision is ultimately one we were forced to make due to the number of visitors from your region when compared to the operational costs necessary to continue providing access there. It was a tough decision but one that we ultimately had to accept. This is an indefinite decision. We genuinely apologize for the inconvenience this will cause all of those who reside within your region.
Note: This is not related to Russia/Ukraine or any other political/military actions around the world.
This is the first time I hear that website like this is stopping operations in certain county?!
Does anyone have any additional clue what is this about?
Please don’t go there. People here also protesting AGAINST Putin, it’s not black and white as your mainstream media wants you to think.
On the topic, even though it says it’s not related, I don’t see other reason, because really this is just informative website about video game. I am stunned and would really like to know the exact reason, maybe they cannot disclose it.
so i stopped using wowhead, it can be accessed with vpn but i don’t do that either. If they don’t care about us, we don’t care about them.
By the way, this has nothing to do with Russia or sanctions.
It’s all about money. In other words, the site does not want to make arbitrary costs, and does not care about us.
I can’t access many of the US websites because they don’t want to bother with GDPR, so they just cut off your access. Same thing on Youtube where many tv/film trailers are region locked for some dumb reason.
Literally no one cares about EU cookie notices either, but they’re still there. Businesses have their own reasons which they don’t have have to disclose.
The reason they’ve given is operational costs. They state that paying the lawyers to look into those countries laws is too expensive compared to the revenue they make from them.
It’s kinda weird to me, as I didn’t think a US (or whatever it is) website had to abide the laws of all countries who have access to that site, but I’m definitely no expert on that topic.
This action was not based on any specific law or regulation in any one or more of the listed countries. Our decision was due to the legal costs involved with reviewing the laws and regulations of the listed countries, in contrast with the amount of visitors/revenue earned from them. As a result of this analysis, we decided not to pursue a legal review and to mitigate our liability in these countries, we opted to block access entirely.
That sounds like the cost for routing into or from Serbia is to high for wowhead. I never thought this could be an issue.
Could be local laws too. Has Serbia strict internet laws like Saudi-Arabia or something?
from reddit:
It looks like wowhead has some legal issues with Serbian laws and it’s not willing to pay a lawyer to look into the issue, because there is not enough money made in Serbia to get that money back.
Luckily no, despite mainstream media in western EU, Serbia is civilized place to live, but that’s becides the topic.
Ok so it seems that some kind of “operational cost” is the issue. As someone up said, I never that thought website located in whatever country, has any costs in any other country from which users are browsing it.
Does that mean if I make a wordpress blog, should I be worried about my costs if users from Turkey are reading it?
Not sure about Serbia, but a country that is part of the EU exactly has those problems under some circumstances.
In Germany every page has to use a legal information (owner, etc) on the website and in all of the EU it’s mandatory to have a cookie and tracker information with the option to turn them off. If you lack one of those you could be sued.
In most cases that’s not happening to normal users, because the costs for such things are too high and courts dismiss it before it gets that far - but for companies this is a different thing.
edit:
wowheads problem in that case could be that they have no one that understands enough Serbian to analyze the Serbian internet laws and so had to hire someone which can quickly get expensive. With shutting it down they avoid any legal issues in the future.
One reason I could maybe think of would be that wowhead allows users to post content themselves (comments, images etc.). Laws for this might be different than for a website that just displays stuff.
Especially with countries like china on the list, who are not necessarily known to value free speech, I could see why they would be interested in having sites abide by their laws when it comes to user created content.
