Beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

Is there even such a thing as a "Mississippi IP?"

I.E. Are US ISPs, particularly big ones like Comcast, required to geolocate ISPs to the state where the person is actually in? What about mobile ones?

Where I live (not US), it is extremely common to get an IP that Maxmind geolocates to a region far from where you actually live.

GeoIP services are not 100% accurate, but that doesn't mean they're completely useless.

The law in question requires "commercially reasonable efforts"

Remember that massive surveillance capitalism apparatus that has been created for years? Now everyone must pay for it to legally comply with whatever arbitrary bullshit no matter how expensive the data becomes

The most popular GeoIP database has a free tier that would easily work for this. And there are many other options.

> The most popular GeoIP database has a free tier that would easily work for this

The free tier does have limits on the number of API calls can you can make. But the good news is you don't have to use their API. You can download the database [1] and do all the lookups locally without having to worry about going over their API limits.

It consists of 10 CSV files and is about 45 MB compressed, 380 MB uncompressed. For just identifying US states from IP address you just need 3 of the CSV files: a 207 MB file of IPv4 address information, a 120 MB file for IPv6, and a 6.7 MB file that lets you lookup by an ID that you find in one of the first two the information about the IP address location including state.

It's easy to write a script to turn this into an SQL database that just contains IP ranges and the corresponding state and then use that with sqlite or whatever network database you use internally from any of your stuff that needs this information.

If you don't actually need Geo IP in general and are only adding it in order to block specific states you can easily omit IPs that are not mapped to those states which would make it pretty small. The database has 3.4 million IPv4 address ranges, but only 5 359 of them are listed as being in Mississippi. There are 1.8 million address ranges in the IPv6 file, and 3 946 of them are listed as being in Mississippi.

Here's how to get the Mississippi ranges from the command line, although this is kind of slow--the 3rd line took 7.5 minutes on my M2 Mac Studio and the 4th took almost 4 minutes. A proper script or program would be a lot faster.

  grep ,MS,Mississippi, GeoLite2-City-Locations-en.csv | cut -d , -f 1 > 1
  sed -e s/^/,/ -e s/$/,/ < 1 > 2
  grep -f 2 GeoLite2-City-Blocks-IPv4.csv | cut -d , -f 1 > MS-IP4.txt
  grep -f 2 GeoLite2-City-Blocks-IPv6.csv | cut -d , -f 1 > MS-IP6.txt

Also a proper script or program would be able to look specifically at the correct field when matching the ID from the locations file to the IP range lines. The commands above just hope that things that look like location IDs don't occur in other fields in the IP range files.

  [1] URL=https://download.maxmind.com/geoip/databases/GeoLite2-City/download?suffix=tar.gz
      curl -L -u userid:license_key $URL > db.tar.gz