question: Why do tech manufacturers region lock their devices?
comment: It's pretty simple, depending on the region you sell your product the highest price people are ready to pay for your device can differ quite significantly. If you have the same price all over the world you wont sell in some regions. If you have different prices and don't region lock people will just buy from the cheapest region. The "solution" is region lock. Tl;dr: it's because of money.
passages: Kaspersky Lab sells its anti-virus products at different prices in different regions and uses regionalized activation codes. A program bought in a country of a region can be activated in another country of the "same" region. Once activated, the software can also be used in and download updates from other regions as long as the license is valid. Problems may arise when the license must be renewed, or if the software must be reinstalled, in a region other than the one where it was bought. The region is identified by the IP address (there is no activation possible without Internet connection), so the use of VPN or a proxy is recommended to circumvent the restriction.
   This new trend also frees IT departments from having to keep up with new technology available on the market, which in recent years has become a complex and constantly growing challenge.
  
  Section::::Prevalence.
  
  The Middle East has one of the highest adoption rates (about 80%) of the practice worldwide in 2012.
  
  According to research by Logicalis, high-growth markets (including Brazil, Russia, India, UAE, and Malaysia) demonstrate a much higher propensity to use their own device at work. Almost 75% of users in these countries did so, compared to 44% in the more mature developed markets.
   BULLET::::- Cordless tool manufacturers making batteries that fit only their own brand of tools, and often are not backwards compatible. Often multiple brands are owned by the same company, and share tool designs and features, accessories and batteries are deliberately changed to make them incompatible. An example would be Stanley Black & Decker who also owns or manufactures Black & Decker, DeWalt, Porter Cable, Mastercraft, and Craftsman. All use almost identical batteries, yet all have some feature designed to stop use in other tools.
  
  Section::::Variations.
   Section::::Printers.
  
  Hewlett-Packard printer cartridges have been regionalised since 2004. Thus they do not work in printers with a different region code, unless the user calls technical support for the device to be reassigned to the appropriate region.
  
  HP printers have four regions:
  
  Region 1: Americas, Greenland, Australia, New Zealand, North/South Korea, Mongolia, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, East Asia
  
  Region 2: Western Europe, Turkey
  
  Region 3: CIS, Africa, Near East, Japan
  
  Region 4: China (except Hong Kong and Taiwan) and India
  
  The region can be changed three times; then, the printer will be locked to a region.
   Regional lockout
  
  A regional lockout (or region coding) is a class of digital rights management preventing the use of a certain product or service, such as multimedia or a hardware device, outside a certain region or territory. A regional lockout may be enforced through physical means, through technological means such as detecting the user's IP address or using an identifying code, or through unintentional means introduced by devices only supporting certain regional technologies (such as video formats, i.e., NTSC and PAL).
   Blocking users, means losing revenue. For operators it is often a trade off between business ethics and revenue. If one other operator in a country does not block the use of stolen handsets, revenue flows to that operator instead of the other, more ethical ones.
   Region 5: Former Yugoslavian states (except Croatia and Slovenia), Eastern Europe, Turkey, Near East, Africa
  
  Canon print cartridges for the Pixma MP 480 will not work in printers of that type with a different region code either (even when listed on the packaging of the Canon printer cartridges in question).
  
  Epson ink cartridges are also use region-coded.
   In September 2013, it was reported that the packaging of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 in America and Europe contained a warning label stating that it would only operate with SIM cards from the region. A spokesperson clarified the policy, stating that it was intended to prevent grey-market reselling, and that it only applied to the first SIM card inserted.
  
  Section::::Credit cards.
   Metered-NA
  
  DMO (developing markets, such as Asia and South America)
  
  XE (Europe).
  
  Section::::Printers.:Circumvention.
  
  One method to bypass printer-region-coding is to store empty cartridges from the old region and refill them with the ink of cartridges from the new region, but many modern ink cartridges have chips and sensors to prevent refilling, which makes the process more difficult.
  
  Some manufacturers of regionalized printers also offer region-free printers specially designed for travelers.
  
  See also Inkjet refill kit#Anti-refilling protections used by printer manufacturers.
  
  Section::::Smartphones.
   BULLET::::- A person who has most of their multimedia equipment interconnected with HDMI will tend to seek HDMI compatibility to all their other multimedia-capable equipment (although this is a far less severe case of lock-in than those above, due to the wide availability of adapters that can be used to connect HDMI equipment to/from—for instance—DVI or DisplayPort equipment).
  
  Section::::Variations.:Collective vendor lock-in.
   Section::::Disadvantages.
  
  Although the ability of staff to work at any time from anywhere and on any device provides real business benefits, it also brings significant risks. Companies must deploy security measures to prevent information ending up in the wrong hands. According to an IDG survey, more than half of 1,600 senior IT security and technology purchase decision-makers reported serious violations of personal mobile device use.
  
  Various risks arise from BYOD, and agencies such as the UK Fraud Advisory Panel encourage organisations to consider these and adopt a BYOD policy.
   Software developers and device manufacturers constantly release security patches to counteract threats from malware. IT departments that support organisations with a BYOD policy must have systems and processes to apply patches protecting systems against known vulnerabilities of the devices that users may use. Ideally, such departments should have agile systems that can quickly adopt the support necessary for new devices. Supporting a broad range of devices obviously carries a large administrative overhead. Organisations without a BYOD policy have the benefit of selecting a small number of devices to support, while organisations with a BYOD policy could also limit the number of supported devices, though this could defeat the objective of allowing users the freedom to choose their preferred device freely.
   However, such organisations also warn consumers of certain risks in using parallel-imported products. Although the products may have been made to comply with the laws and customs of their place of origin, these products or their use may not comply with those in places where they are used, or some of their functions may be rendered unusable or meaningless (which may needlessly drive up prices). Electronic devices, however, suffer less from this type of risk because newer models support more than one user language.
  
  Section::::Examples.
  
  Section::::Examples.:Australia.
   Section::::Lock screens by platform.
  
  Section::::Lock screens by platform.:Mobile operating systems.
   The American and European models of the Galaxy Note 3 implement a regional lockout system in certain regions; requiring that the SIM card used on a European and North American model be from a carrier in that region. While a Samsung spokesperson claimed that the lock would be removed once a valid SIM card is used, it was reported by users that this was not the case. Although an XDA Developers user developed a tool to clear the carrier blacklist that the system uses, it requires that the phone be rooted. A spokesperson claimed that the system was primarily intended to prevent grey market reselling, although some critics suspected that carriers may have asked Samsung to implement the feature in order to force users to roam while travelling by preventing them from using a local SIM card. Samsung also stated that it implemented a similar policy on Galaxy S III, Note II, S4, and S4 Mini models manufactured after July 2013.
   A regional lockout may be enforced for several reasons, such as to stagger the release of a certain product, to avoid losing sales to the product's foreign publisher, to maximize the product's impact in a certain region through localization, to hinder grey market imports by enforcing price discrimination, or to prevent users from accessing certain content in their territory because of legal reasons (either due to censorship laws, or because a distributor does not have the rights to certain intellectual property outside their specified region).
  
  Section::::Multimedia.
  
  Section::::Multimedia.:Disc regions.
   A BYOD policy must be created based on the company’s requirements. BYOD can be dangerous to organizations, as mobile devices may carry malware. If an infected device connects to the company network, data breaches may occur. If a mobile device has access to business computing systems, the company's IT administrator should have control over it. A BYOD policy helps eliminate the risk of having malware in the network, as the management team can monitor all contents of the device and erase data if any suspicious event is captured. BYOD policies may specify that the company is responsible for any devices connected to a company network.
   In industrial processes it can be difficult to establish where the appropriate danger sources might be. For example, a food processing plant may have input and output tanks and high-temperature cleaning systems connected, but not in the same room or area of the factory. It would not be unusual to have to visit several areas of the factory in order to effectively isolate a device for service (the device itself for power, upstream material feeders, downstream feeders and control room).
   The Xbox One was initially planned to have a region blocking policy that would have prevented its use outside its region in an effort to curb parallel importing. However, Microsoft later reversed the policy and the final retail version of the console was not region-locked. It was reported, though, that the console would be region-locked in China.. However, this decision has since been reverted 
  
  Section::::Video games.:Other.
   Several market and policies have emerged to address BYOD security concerns, including mobile device management (MDM), containerization and app virtualization. While MDM allows organizations to control applications and content on the device, research has revealed controversy related to employee privacy and usability issues that lead to resistance in some organizations. Corporate liability issues have also emerged when businesses wipe devices after employees leave the organization.
   Xerox also uses region codes. Their printers are shipped with neutral "factory" ink sticks with no region coding. Upon the installation of the first new ink stick after these factory sticks, the machine will set a region code based on the installed ink stick and will only accept ink stick for that region from that point forward. "Officially, " only three starter ink sticks per color can be used; then, the printer will no longer accept them and will want region-coded ink sticks to be inserted, but there are workarounds for that problem.
  
  Common region settings are:
  
  NA (North America)
   Historically, device manufacturers and mobile carriers have typically been unsupportive of third-party firmware development. Manufacturers express concern about improper functioning of devices running unofficial software and the support costs resulting from this. Moreover, modified firmware such as CyanogenMod sometimes offer features, such as tethering, for which carriers would otherwise charge a premium. As a result, technical obstacles including locked bootloaders and restricted access to root permissions are common in many devices. However, as community-developed software has grown more popular, and following a statement by the Librarian of Congress in the United States that permits the "jailbreaking" of mobile devices, manufacturers and carriers have softened their position regarding third party development, with some, including HTC, Motorola, Samsung and Sony, providing support and encouraging development. As a result of this, over time the need to circumvent hardware restrictions to install unofficial firmware has lessened as an increasing number of devices are shipped with unlocked or unlockable bootloaders, similar to Nexus series of phones, although usually requiring that users waive their devices' warranties to do so. However, despite manufacturer acceptance, some carriers in the US still require that phones are locked down, frustrating developers and customers.
   It is more difficult for the firm to manage and control the consumer technologies and make sure they serve the needs of the business. Firms need an efficient inventory management system that keeps track of the devices employees are using, where the device is located, whether it is being used, and what software it is equipped with. If sensitive, classified, or criminal data lands on a U.S. government employee's device, the device is subject to confiscation.
   In 2017, the European Commission began investigating Valve and five other publishers—Bandai Namco Entertainment, Capcom, Focus Home Interactive, Koch Media and ZeniMax Media—for anti-competitive practices, specifically the use of geo-blocking through the Steam storefront and Steam product keys to prevent access to software to citizens of certain countries. Such practices would be against the Digital Single Market initiative set by the European Union. The French gaming trade group, Syndicat National du Jeu Vidéo, noted that geo-blocking was a necessary feature to hinder inappropriate product key reselling, where a group buys a number of keys in regions where the cost is low, and then resells them into regions of much higher value to profit on the difference, outside of European oversight and tax laws.
   The diversity of Android devices appeals to consumer buyers, but is a source of anxiety for IT security experts. OpenSignal, a UK-based mobile company, recently published a survey of almost 700,000 devices and reported approximately 12,000 distinct Android devices using eight different versions of the Google operating system. For many IT organizations charting out their BYOD strategy, this translates into security risks that are tough to monitor and control.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Mobile business intelligence
  
  BULLET::::- Mobile security
  
  BULLET::::- Mobile device management
  
  BULLET::::- Mobile application management
  
  BULLET::::- Bring your own device
  
  BULLET::::- Unified Endpoint Management
  
  Section::::References.
  