Geo-location/ tracing is very common, and often for the copyright reasons - some US TV channels block previews of their shows being seen outside USA, some others like BBC, have a policy of adverts for non-UK viewers of some/all (?) BBC websites,
(a) because that brings in some cash (though no idea how much of a benefit it is if people use advert blockers on Opera or Firefox browsers) and
(b) because they can, justifying it with "UK people pay for a TV licence"
It often fails, of course, if the tables of data are not up-to-date (I wanted to listen to a radio station from Brighton but was denied as it thought I was outside UK - actually using Three mobile dongle for my home connection).
www.http-tunnel.com offers a way for people outside the USA to access (some) US services (free, at reduced speed) from up to 3 PCs in a home network, and "Tor" allows anonymous access to web services, via volunteers all over the world, so it's (unfortunately) pot luck what country you would appear as being from.
Some sites switch you to a "local" version, eg .co.uk for some, .com for others (US/Canada) where pricing details might be different (eg swap of US$ to UK pound in pricing, but because you cannot easily see the US prices, don't know the way they might be skewing the prices.