| > Netflix commonly showed me a “sorry you’re using a vpn > Perhaps this has changed It is an ongoing arms race. Sometimes the VPN providers are winning, sometimes the streaming services make a temporarily successful counter-offensive, sometimes the battleground is a mess with things working for some mixes of vpn/country/streamer but not others.⁰ The streaming services block the address ranges of known data-centres, though not commercial addresses more generally because there is often enough a cross-over between residential and commercial ISP accounts¹² so that is one workaround VPN providers can use in their choice of exit points (though bandwidth can be significantly more expensive that way than from a DC). I'm not aware of it actually being done, but I'd not be surprised to find a less ethical VPN business hasn't tried to use their customers as a mesh and redirecting traffic around them as needed much like botnets use compromised hosts to forward requests. There are obvious technical difficulties here that make it a less practical idea³ but I can imagine someone trying it. -- [0] Reference: I don't use a VPN this way myself, preferring the other major unlicensed media access route, bit I know a few people who do with varying levels of success over time. [1] My home account is essentially a commercial one as that is the ISPs main customer base, I use them for a number of reasons (fixed IPv4 that I can run servers off, in fact a /29 of v4 addresses though that is a lot less important to me now than it was some years ago, native IPv6 which is still no commonplace here (though I still haven't set that up properly after all this time!), much better support when things fail, so I'm not the one spending time chasing BT OR, etc.) [2] Similarly, many small offices actually run their access off what is targetted as a residential account. And small businesses based in/around a home are another grey area. [3] In many places most residential users have significantly asymmetric bandwidth, throttling their ability to be used as a relay, and a mix of accounts from different countries looking to come from the same address might trip the streaming services' account anomaly detection heuristics. |
I believe the reason for not doing this is simply because streaming providers would like to keep that option open to avoid losing a customer.