Since it is a production of them, is seems utterly moronic to remove one of the main reasons people would join their services in the first place. Many non-us customers joined, just to cancel the account right after they realized that they had no access to the good content. In some cases this is not the fault of netflix, but that of 19th century copyright laws. I cannot blame them, when other services had the rights prior to them...
But 'House of Cards' is a Netflix production, and this doesn't apply here. They would have done themselfs a favour by not selling the rights to this content to the highest bidder. Especially since their ads suggest access to 'House of Cards'.
The problem comes from the original BBC House of Cards. Netflix doesn't actually own the rights, they're licensed from a company called Media Rights Capital.
Netflix funded production, so would have had strong leverage over MRC's relicensing. We can't see the contracts, but I'm fairly confident that Netflix would have had at least right of first refusal for rights for any region.
Leverage only goes so far. Since it was originally a BBC show ~20 years ago, chances are that country-specific rights were sold off long before Netflix got involved.
It's likely impossible to say without having insider knowledge. Perhaps somebody with international IP law could weigh in.
But it appears there's an added wrinkle. Back when the show started production, MRC sold off rights in countries where Netflix didn't yet operate. CanalPlus in France and Sky Deutschland in Germany managed to get exclusive rights in their respective countries. Netflix is trying to get the rights globally, but they can't force anyone to sell them anything.
But 'House of Cards' is a Netflix production, and this doesn't apply here. They would have done themselfs a favour by not selling the rights to this content to the highest bidder. Especially since their ads suggest access to 'House of Cards'.