Five territorial lists print Mexico, and every one runs long

The addresses that produced the count

Every row came from a stored capture rather than from a page answering live that day. Four of the five addresses were built for audiences elsewhere: two Australian-English directories, one Canadian-English directory and one German-language directory. Where an agreement exists in several editions, the wording of one edition is evidence about that edition, and the column above records which one was opened.

What a shorter document does with the same region

The contrast that gives the Mexican figure its meaning sits to the south-east. Two documents in this set are short by the standards of the group: one reaches 37 of the 122 markets here, the other 25. Both print Brazil. Both pass over Mexico.

The region is therefore split by drafting habit rather than by geography. Sweeping documents collect Mexico as part of the Americas, while compact documents that pick their targets have so far picked a different one. The Brazilian count stands at four for that reason, lower than the Mexican figure and drawn from a partly different roster of brands.

Northwards the pattern turns again. No list among the 38 prints Canada, while the United States appears in 32 of them, the heaviest figure this index holds. Three neighbouring markets, three figures with almost nothing in common, produced by the same 38 documents on one day.

Thirty-three lists where the Mexican entry is missing

Thirty-three operators published a schedule of excluded territories, that schedule was read here, and Mexico was absent from the text.

The sentence stays deliberately narrow, since widening it would import promises the document declines to make. A published list is a defensive instrument: naming a territory costs an operator very little, so breadth is cheap and silence carries no commitment. Between a reader and a completed payout stand payment routing, the operator's own verification clause, and any regional edition of the terms that was never the one captured. Wording is the least of those obstacles, and wording is all that these 33 files describe.

Sixty-two files that stayed shut

The largest group behind this page contributes the least to it. Sixty-two of the hundred brands in the library have a territorial clause that was never retrieved, whether because the address moved, the page asked for an account, or the queue has yet to reach it.

Those cells are empty. An empty cell records unfinished reading and nothing beyond it: no weight in any sum, no lift up the table, and certainly no permission. Read as a green light, it would turn a gap in the work into a recommendation. How we read sets out the standard a document meets before its cell gets filled.

Among the twelve brands in the comparison table below, four publish a list that has been opened here, and Mexico appears in none of the four. Those four therefore belong to the middle group above, and the remaining eight rows stay blank for the reason just given.

A commercial clause, and the questions it never answers

A territorial list answers one question, which the operator puts to itself: which markets will this company deal with. Licence conditions push on the answer, processors push on it, and appetite for the cost of serving a market pushes hardest of all. Revisions arrive quietly and travel with no explanation attached.

What Mexican law says to a reader in Mexico belongs to a separate subject with separate sources, and this page leaves it there. Both kinds of document look formal on a screen, which is why they blur together so readily. The blurring happens in the reading; the documents themselves stay firmly apart.

Wave one continues with the operator table, the page for Colombia and the page for Chile.