[tshtf]

It isn't fighting a hydra.

The Netflix team is known for using reproducible automation in all their efforts. They have a significant "big data" team that can use and setup automatic classification using hundreds of available data points to classify users who are violating their ToS versus those who aren't. Netflix doesn't do anything that is labor or cost intensive: they have all of this automated.

Even approaching this from a naive set of data points is cheap: It isn't particularly hard to classify IP addresses between cable modem blocks and those for VPS/VPN providers. Geolocation on a country level is relatively reliable. Also it's pretty easy to detect OpenVPN users on layers 2 and 3.:

https://medium.com/@ValdikSS/detecting-vpn-and-its-configura...

[baby]

I don't see how they could block VPN at all. Checking the amount of packet fragmentation works well if you want to make guesses, but if you start blocking on that you're in a lot of trouble...