That's still not giving a concrete reason. Why would I need to access gigabyte.com? I can't even buy their products there; I'd have to buy them on something like Amazon. Firmware updates? If it works I'm not going to change it. If it doesn't, I'm going to return it. If products try to reach out to their manufacturers on their own that's twice the reason to default block as much as you can.

Looking up manuals, researching products before purchasing them, there’s a bunch of reasons to go to a manufacturer’s website.

Firmware updates can fix compatibility long after a purchase, it’s not just a question of whether something works on day 1 but day 540. IE why isn’t this EV charger taking to the solar inverter so it preferentially charges the car over sending energy to the grid? Firmware fix and suddenly it all works.

Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though? Nobody's saying that grown-ups should be blocked inside a US-only Internet. We're saying that cleaning up US IP space from free no-questions-asked porn would mean that parents could allow children more freedom by choosing to allow traffic only to US IPs by default. Just like you could allow your 10-year-old child to roam around a mall if (but ONLY if) you knew it didn't have stores demonstrating sex toys out in front of them.

> Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though?

Because they're interested in it. I was installing Linux when I was 9 because I thought it was cool.

If my parents had walled me off into a foam internet safe-room, it would have stifled one of my lifelong interests that led to my career, and bred trust issues and resentment against my parents.

Weird, because if it was my kid in that scenario, when they found a false-positive in the Internet filter, they'd open their mouth and show me the problem, and I'd just type in my code to unblock it and say "Sorry, kiddo!"

If I had to ask my parents for permission to be interested in something, there's a lot I wouldn't have pursued and the simple gatekeeping is enough of a motivator to find something else to do or bypass the gatekeeper altogether.