Google Contacts API responds with “countryBlock” error

Question

I have an app that imports contacts from Google Contacts. The app worked fine, until this morning when we changed the API 'owner'. It was set up under my personal account for development purposes.

After setting up everything, Google started responding with this:

Array
(
    [error] => Array
        (
            [errors] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [domain] => global
                            [reason] => countryBlocked
                            [message] => This service is not available from your country
                        )
                )
            [code] => 403
            [message] => This service is not available from your country
        )
)

This is the line that generates the error, and the functions declaration (they are in different files):

$xmlresponse = curl_file_get_contents($url);

function curl_file_get_contents($url)
{
    $curl      = curl_init();
    $userAgent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)';

    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url); //The URL to fetch. This can also be set when initializing a session with curl_init().
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE); //TRUE to return the transfer as a string of the return value of curl_exec() instead of outputting it out directly.
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5); //The number of seconds to wait while trying to connect.

    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent); //The contents of the "User-Agent: " header to be used in a HTTP request.
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE); //To follow any "Location: " header that the server sends as part of the HTTP header.
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, TRUE); //To automatically set the Referer: field in requests where it follows a Location: redirect.
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10); //The maximum number of seconds to allow cURL functions to execute.
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE); //To stop cURL from verifying the peer's certificate.
    $contents = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);

    return $contents;
}

I've tried forcing a different IP using: curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("REMOTE_ADDR: $ip", "HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR: $ip")); and I've commented out the user agent line. However, no luck.

When I run it from my localhost, it works fine with no errors. I am in South Africa and the server this error is generated on, is in Germany.

I've tried googling for Google's country policies but came up short.

Can anyone explain why this is happening and how I can bypass it?

Answer 1

This error indicates that Google believes your IP address belongs to a country with restricted access. Germany is not one of those countries however, so this is likely an error. Please fill out the following form to have this corrected: https://support.google.com/websearch/contact/ip

Answer 2

check out this thread, which is similar. It says the issue is caused by contacting google API central core with http: requests (not https:)

Intermittent 403 "This service is not available from your country" Error for execution API