Google and Geofencing

[Bigun]

So recently I updated my company's firewall policies to Geofence our browsing to just the United States and Canada. After doing so, all Google services seemed to slow to a crawl.

Does Google use ad-services or something overseas?
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[Fitzcarraldo]

Well, it certainly has data centres outside the US:

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html
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Fitzcarraldo's blog

[Ralphred]

I've played with implementing similar concepts in the past, with varying degrees of success. Most problems I came across were due to the firewall (as in hardware) not having the legs to run the algorithm required in a timely fashion, and it was the dedicated hardware appliances, rather counter intuitively, that fell the most foul of this, i.e. cisco gbit router brought to it's knees by a rudimentary "great firewall of China".

Primarily I'd be looking at the load average of your hardware, then using something like lightbeam (firefox addon) to log connections and see if any of these would fall foul of your new rules (do this from outside your network).
If you don't have load issues then you can start logging stuff falling foul of these new rules, run some controlled tests and see what stuff is being dropped.

I find this interesting in a tin foil hat kinda way, and find myself asking is Google doing something with your data on remote servers that would contravene local regulations if they did it onshore?

[bunder]

Are you dropping both incoming and outgoing? You could switch to dropping incoming and simply logging outgoing, if you're trying to access outside stuff, you'll find out pretty quickly.