zlacker

>>mmaria+(OP)
The VPN trick potentially won’t last long. We’ve seen it go stale already in the world of intellectual property rights. For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)

One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.

The more troubling thing about these laws is enforcement. The threat of fines only works against websites that map to a business entity. For anything else there will surely see a ramp up in the size of The Great British Firewall Ruleset, edited by the courts, and distributed to the Big N (5?) ISPs.

What will become of the smaller ISPs that refuse to block illegal sites?

>>gorgoi+Em
This is just a cat a mouse game. VPN services will start to offer residential endpoints when enough websites start blocking them enough to damage the value proposition. There is no way on the current internet to verify an ip address means anything at all other than it's an ip address.

>>kelsey+S51
There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites. As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.

>>ricard+a81
As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?

Which sounds like a silly question ("of course the marketing is BS") but why even bother marketing if the core value proposition of your billed-monthly service doesn't work? Seems like a waste of money since you'll at most get people for one month when they cancel after realizing they can't watch Canadian Netflix from Florida, or whatever.

>>h3half+8g1
I can confirm that PIA does not reliably get around geo restrictions. There's only so many IPs in the pool, and the content providers will block them.

There are alternatives like Hola VPN, a "free" peer to peer VPN except non-paying users have traffic routed through them. But performance of peer to peer VPNs are not as good.