Offer Void in Nebraska: Difference between revisions
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The answer lies deep in some obscure regulatory concepts, a few silly rules imposed by the Bell System, combined with an odd bit of [[Cold War]] surplus.
The first toll-free calling system, InWATS, was introduced by the Bell System in 1966-67. By modern standards, its capabilities were primitive. There was no itemised list of what calls arrived or from where; instead, freephone subscribers paid for special flat-rate trunks which would accept unmetered calls from a wide area - ranging from "Band 1" (adjacent US states) to "Band 6" (which reached clear across the country, but cost a fortune). Interstate tariffs were regulated by the US [[Media Watchdog|Federal Communications Commission]], while intrastate rates were controlled by often-lax state regulators (and sometimes cost more). That required they terminate on a different toll-free number. Among the factors behind selecting one hard-wired location for a national call centre:
* A location in the geographic centre of the country would only need "Band 3" trunks (which reached halfway across the nation in every direction) for nationwide coverage; by contrast, comparable service from somewhere like San Diego would require the most expensive inbound lines ("Band 6") that money could buy, to reach clear across the country.
* Even with those expensive trunks, intrastate calls couldn't come in on the same national number, a potentially-fatal limitation if the call centre were in a populous state like California.
* Regional accents in the spoken language become very noticeable if one call centre were to serve the nation. A Midwestern accent is fairly neutral, a Confederate southern drawl less so.
The original InWATS system was eventually replaced
Often summed up quite simply with "Void where prohibited," a magical phrase which shifts the onus of learning about obscure laws away from the seller and onto the consumer.
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== Magazines ==
* ''[[Mad Magazine]]'' once spoofed this trope with a coupon that was "Void where prohibited. Prohibited where void. [[Department of Redundancy Department|Void and prohibited where not allowed]]."
* If a British comic, such as ''[[The Beano]]'' or ''[[The Dandy (comics)|The Dandy]]'', has a cover mounted free gift, it would often be absent when sold in the Republic of Ireland. Probably also applies to
** Canada tends to get two versions of UK magazines that have cover-mounted "gifts": a higher-priced version with the item and a lower-priced version without.
== Video Games ==
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** A variation, some randomly pulled cards could be exchanged by mail for small prizes: Canadians had to complete a brief math problem to get their prize.
* The city of [http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Kelowna&g=Kelowna&ie=UTF8&z=10&iwloc=addr Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada] was apparently bribed to do this; EB Games (since bought out by GameStop; those that are still EB Games simply didn't feel like changing the signs) are prohibited from buying used games in city limits, because the pawn shops "complained" that the chain stores took away their business.
* Conversely, the ''[[Second City Television]]'' segment with "Bob and Doug MacKenzie" was originally created to occupy a sliver of time which was available on the Canadian broadcast (which had fewer ads) but not the US version.
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* Even the Internet falls victim to this. Because television shows are almost always licensed for viewing only in certain countries, online players will usually block users from foreign countries. Never mind asking ''why'' the networks prefer to limit their potential advertising base, but they do. [[YouTube]] offers the ability to do this as well because it offers content from television networks. It's probably easier to list sites that ''don't'' do this. Unauthorized uploads on Vimeo and the like obviously don't count.
** This leads to such absurdities like a Sony ad not being viewable in Germany because it contains music by ... Sony Entertainment.
** Netflix is bad for this; it will display a wide selection stateside, but half of that content will be missing in Canada or some other country. The North Korean cyberattacks on Sony Pictures released a long trail of records of the studios pressuring Netflix to shut down access for VPN users (a common way to view US Netflix in Canada); Netflix caved to this coercion. Not that cable or satellite TV are any better; there's a long history of Canadian cable TV tampering with US border station signals that dates to at least [[The Seventies]], and Bell actually went to the Supreme Court to keep US DreckTV receivers out of the hands of Canadians in 2002.
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