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.
Yep, they are all lying to you, but with a wiggle room for a workaround or to point the blame at Netflix. Once you get in, you'll notice that Netflix, Prime Video, Steam, some of YouTube, and pretty much any legitimate service with geo-fencing not working. You then email support complaining that this is not working for you. The answer varies depending on the company. For example:
- Private Internet Access will try to up sell you for your own static IP. That hopefully remains undiscovered by Netflix et al for a bit. (Obviously you're trading anonymity and privacy aspects of a VPN if it's a static ip attached to you, but I don't think people trying to stream Netflix from Italy or where ever care about that)
- Mullvad will tell you: yeah that doesn't work. We never advertised that. Don't renew next month.
- Proton will keep asking you to try endpoints manually (each country has hundreds of endpoints and their app picks a random one. Just keep trying different ones manually. They might give your account access to some "new endpoints" (if they have them) that are not blocked yet. Hopefully once the refund period has passed, they will tell you "sorry we're having trouble with Netflix currently. we're working on it"
Some of them will suggest using "another streaming service??" because "Netflix is having issues in [INSERT_COUNTRY]"
The 1 month period is also usually priced much higher anways. E.g. PIA is currently $11.95/m for 1 month, $39.96 for 1 year, and $79.17 for 3.25 years (instead of half a year @ monthly). With a curve that steep it's obvious they have severe retention issues at short intervals.
They can, it’s just a lot more expensive than a $10 a month VPN. They’re typically metered and you pay by the byte.
I mean, it’s more of a bot network really, but there is a massive amount of bandwidth there.
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.
And is_vpn(ip_address) is a service that's offered by a variety of vendors already.
Literally - in most of the world terms of service have no legal effect and violating them is not a crime - they are merely a declaration that the service provider feels bad if you do certain things, and if they feel bad they might decide to terminate your account.
Most of them prohibit running servers at home and using p2p apps. Has anyone here ever gotten their connection shut off for either of these?