crossmr

Your claim was that it never happened, this was just a single well known example of it happening.

At that point, Valve says a team of people will investigate those anomalies, and, if they determine that something fishy is afoot, they’ll “mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer.” If Valve finds that coordinated review bombing has indeed occurred, any reviews posted during that time period won’t count toward the game’s review score.

Also it isn't fully automatic. Valve claims that people are involved 'evaluating it', and the result of the evaluation was that reviews were not counted.

https://kotaku.com/superhot-game-gets-review-bombed-after-removing-depicti-1847352470

This was in direct response to changes in the game, any negative reviews because of changes made to the game are legitimate reviews, not a 'review bomb'.

triggering Valve’s anti-review-bombing tech to kick in and filter out the flood of bad-faith evaluations.

https://kotaku.com/valve-says-it-will-remove-off-topic-review-bombs-from-s-1833332643

“We’re going to identify off-topic review bombs, and remove them from the Review Score.”

Of course Steam is the arbiter of what they deem 'off-topic'

Why? Steam has come out and labelled legitimate criticism of games a 'review bomb' in the past. They're more than happy to bend over for big publishers like this.

Canada either did, or still does, have a law like this. Years ago back when getting chipped cards for satellites was a pretty big thing, a lot of people near the US border could get ones from the US that weren't available in Canada and get the chipped card or whatever it was. At one point the company made a request to the Canadian authorities to crack down on it, and the response was something to the effect of 'your product isn't available here, you don't have standing to ask us to do that'.

It's easier to define it as this:

If you commercially release something and region restrict it, people in any region where you don't also provide a legal way to purchase/use it should be free to get it however they want.

B2B contact is generally fine, unless you're going to be a stalker about it. Had one the other day who messaged me on linkedin with her pitch and included the standard 'If you have time and this is interesting feel free to reach out' I saw the e-mail pop up just as I was stepping away to have lunch, as it was the standard lunch time. Before I even got downstairs (work from home) my company's calling me out of the blue to tell me they have a call for me from this person. I declined the call, as we both agreed it was just business spam and after lunch responded and let them know we'd never be interested in their services. 'Feel free to get in touch if you're interested' and 'I'm going to track down your company's phone number and call you 30 seconds after I send this' just don't vibe for me.