What if I want to just look at a product with no intention to buy it? What if I do want to buy it and use a parcel forwarding service to get it to me?

I do some backend work for a small company that sells a downloadable software product.

As far as we can tell no one in China has ever bought our product in the ~15 years it has been available. None of our pages are localized for China. If someone in China wanted a product that does what ours does there are Chinese companies whose products are cheaper and probably better for Chinese users.

Yet last time I checked something like 95% of downloads of our product came from China. I took a bunch of IP addresses from the download logs and looked to see if I could figure out something about these downloaders.

All of them seemed to be at hosting companies, not end user machines. Looking at nearby IP addresses to see what else is hosted at the same hosting company they were mostly scam or borderline scam sites or porn sites. The later was a bit unexpected because at least according to Wikipedia porn and any involvement with it is prohibited in China.

I don't see any good reason I should not block Chinese downloads. We have to pay for the bandwidth they use, they are extremely unlikely to generate any revenue for us even indirectly, and they are coming from sketchy commercial IP neighborhoods rather than end users.

As a wise man once said, "You don't always get what you want "

>What if I want to just look at a product with no intention to buy it?

Then they want you even less.

In any case, if a company doesn't want to do business with your country, that's it. What matters whether you want to buy it or not? (Not to mention a lot of the abuse towards developers comes from no buying customers as well - people who want some feature added "before they buy", who just use the trial or free version, etc.).

You can always find a competitor company that does serve you.

International customers are more trouble than it's worth when you're a small company and you as a seller are the one who absorbs the loss in cases of delayed, defective, lost or damaged items.

I'm talking about one use case of Cloudflare I've seen. I don't think I can be held responsible for the commercialization of the Internet when I make and freely distribute monkey movies.