Why the Netflix VPN Ban Will Fail and Hurt Online Privacy

Netflix has aggressively stepped up efforts to block people who connect to its video streaming service using VPNs or other proxies. The company says it wants to prevent illegal content access. But the strategy is unlikely to work, and will probably just increase VPN use in the long run. Here’s why.

First, the backstory: If you live in the United States, you have probably never thought about using a VPN in conjunction with Netflix. That’s because U.S.-based Netflix users have access to a wide selection of content.

But in many other countries, Netflix doesn’t offer as many streaming shows and videos, for the perfectly good reason that it does not have the distribution rights for all content in the regions in question.

Traditionally, using a VPN or another type of proxy service (such as a DNS proxy specialized for Netflix) provided a way for people in other countries to access more Netflix content. By routing their connection through a VPN server based in the United States (or wherever they wanted), they could access all of the content normally available to people based in that country.

Netflix mostly tolerated this for a while. Then, in January, it announced plans to crack down on VPN use. It put those plans into action a few days ago, prompting an outcry from users.

A lot of people have already pointed out reasons why the VPN ban is silly, and could harm Netflix’s business in the long run. One is that some people use VPNs with Netflix for security and privacy purposes, not to access content that is not legally available to them in their location. Another reason is that the ban is likely to push people back toward more seriously illegal means of obtaining content, such as BitTorrent.

Why the Netflix VPN Ban Will Fail

Here’s another reason why the ban won’t prove effective in the long run, which few people have noted so far: There are ways to beat it — namely, by using more sophisticated types of VPNs. The downside is that those strategies often entail less privacy. Therefore, the ban will simply bring these methods into more widespread use, while compromising online privacy for Netflix users.

To understand why, a brief explanation of how Netflix’s VPN blocking works is in order. By all indications, the company blocks VPNs by identifying the IP addresses associated with VPN servers that people are using to connect. If lots of people — hundreds or thousands — are connecting to Netflix simultaneously via a single IP address, it becomes obvious that that is a VPN server, and Netflix blocks it.

If, on the other hand, you connect to Netflix via a VPN server whose IP address is not used on a massive scale, you stand a much better chance of getting through. You’ll look like any other user. Without having a complete list of the IP addresses of every VPN server in the world, Netflix can’t know that you are using a VPN.

What this means in practice is that there are still a few ways to get around the Netflix VPN blocking. They are all variations on getting an IP address that is not used by lots of other people. They include:

The caveat to these approaches is that having a private IP address also makes you easier to track, because you leave a more singular path on the Internet. As a result, people who want to access Netflix this way have to sacrifice privacy in order to circumvent Netflix’s silly VPN ban. So, in the long run, no one really wins — other than, perhaps, VPN companies who get more people to pay for private IP addresses.

So, unless Netflix plans to start selling VPN service itself, it’s unclear what it really stands to gain here.