Possibly, but I'd wager that it doesn't play any part in this. Not only is it completely non-standard, using arbitrary divisions that often vary at completely d

Possibly, but I'd wager that it doesn't play any part in this. Not only is it completely non-standard, using arbitrary divisions that often vary at completely different geographical levels, providers are woefully slow and inaccurate at actually updating it -- the few that still have such vestiges often publish completely inaccurate mappings (e.g. Bell Canada and Rogers both have this with their intermediary nodes, with descriptions that have no correlation with their actual locations). My provider -- a nationwide provider -- simply uses a no-additional-information IP quartet with a suffix as the DNS. Zero geographical information. Many others follow the same trend. And the nodes in between vary and change frequently as they update their infrastructure and pathways. I do remember when this whole exercise began and it started as a bunch of users running a desktop tool that would provide self-geolocation and publish it back. But...why? Why did we ever need this on the desktop and is it worth the privacy intrusion.