Restriction of European Visitors in US media - an update

In November 2021, I did some testing to see how many US media were blocking European visitors to avoid complying with GDPR. To my surprise, most of them actually used the HTTP 451 code that was created in reference of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 novel.

Example of page blocked with HTTP 451 (Source: Wikipedia)

Example of page blocked with HTTP 451 (Source: Wikipedia)

I recently found a new list of over 5000 US media domains established in 2021 by Clemm von Hohenberg, B., Menchen-Trevino, E., Casas, A., Wojcieszak, M., so I decided to run a new series of test based on this list.

This list contains 5397 domains. After testing them, only 5009 gave a valid answer to my HTTP requests, which give us the following results (the test was done on February 13th):

Total Blocking European Visitors
5009  958 / 19.12%

Overall, we get an even higher percentage than the one found in 2021, which is confirming that 15 to 20% of US media websites are blocking visitors from the EU.

You can find the dataset on GitHub.