The paper enumerates at least eight distinct non-censorship motivations for server-side geo-blocking — economic sanctions, third-party liability (SESTA), copyright, GDPR compliance, security/fraud concerns, hosting costs, revenue optimization, and misconfiguration — each of which can produce the same observable signals (403 blockpages, DNS failures, TCP resets) as government censorship. Naive measurement methods that treat all location-based unavailability as censorship will produce systematic false positives.
From 2018-tschantz-bestiary — A Bestiary of Blocking: The Motivations and Modes behind Website Unavailability
· §2, Table 1
· 2018
· Free and Open Communications on the Internet
Implications
Censorship measurement pipelines should classify blocking by actor (server-side vs. middlebox) and by declared motivation (blockpage text, HTTP status code) before attributing observed unavailability to a national censor.
Circumvention tools that present themselves as fighting 'censorship' should be scoped carefully — users hitting GDPR or sanctions blocks need different solutions (e.g., a VPN) than users hitting Great Firewall DPI.