From a technical standpoint, how can they actually enforce this?
I can see how they can do this for publically advertised proxies used by many people, but what about individuals with their own cloud servers hosting their own proxy or VPN? (i.e. me!)
I can see how they can do this for publically advertised proxies used by many people, but what about individuals with their own cloud servers hosting their own proxy or VPN? (i.e. me!)
What's actually interesting is that they are now openly admitting that they have been turning a blind eye to this before when 1. it's relatively simple and 2. it has always been a requirement of the content rights holders.
Edit: Apparently I've been working on AWS VPCs so long I no longer remember how to spell VPN
And that's probably good enough. I imagine (but have zero proof) that they need to be seen to be taking reasonable efforts to stop out-of-region people from accessing their services, rather than having some system that absolutely blocks 100% of out-of-region accesses.
1.They don't need to stop you on sight, nor cur your connection every time you connected through VPN. But if they can eventually detect your pattern, then disrupt it, which will lead to great inconvenience for you, and it will be sufficient to stop most of the users from using VPN.
2.They can surely use your billing information for this purpose, as it is case with Google Play.
3.Another thing to be remind of, a international user might not always use VPN for Netflix, likely they will switch back for their local content at some point. If such traffic switch happens, it is easy to detect for further action.
4.Again, it is quite complicated process I believe, and like all softwares, there are loopholes. But I believe their goal is to stop MOST common users from using VPN for cross-regional content easily, not ALL of them. This is quite achievable.
It is just my speculation, but as consider the same practice is actually enforced before, e.g. DVD region codes.
For example, if you're locked to the US region and watch something that is only available in the US while visiting, say, the UK — would that break any of Netflix's license agreements?
Distributors don't care about this, they care about geographically determined licenses. And apparently they want to see that this is technically enforced to some degree.
Try to buy some apps in one country and download them again while in another.
Last time I read about this it wasn't possible to do so.
This was the issue I read about, just the example was from a guy in Europe that moved back to Canada.
"Tough"
If they did that all it'd is have one of our mates living in the US to make us an account and we'd never have to VPN again.
They'll never do this based on billing address because they don't care where you're FROM, they care where you ARE.
Yes, in theory, smart people can set up their own VPN and work around it. But they'd probably be happy if the average user can't access it. I doubt their goal is 100% coverage, they'd be happy with 90%.