Advertisementįalling afoul of Netflix's VPN block doesn't hurt quite as badly these days as it did in 2015. 'You have hundreds of thousands of legitimate residential Netflix subscribers blocked,' WeVPN's spokesperson said. One commercial VPN provider told TorrentFreak that recently, Netflix began blocking those 'residential' proxy addresses as well-with some readily apparent collateral damage. Both sides are pretty cagey about the technical details, but one technique the VPN providers use is leasing IP addresses in supposedly 'residential' IP subnets to use as exit proxies. This basic conflict between VPN providers eager to keep region-shifting customers happy and streaming services trying to keep content licensers pacified led to a six-year-long cat-and-mouse game. This move can buy a blocklist evader a few days or even weeks before the new subnet is added to the list. The simplest way is just to discard an existing subnet that's been widely identified as 'VPN/proxy' and purchase another, 'clean' space. Since Netflix first began blocking commercial VPN and proxy providers in 2015, those services have fought back by finding ways to evade its and other streaming services' blocking attempts. Recently, as reported by TorrentFreak, Netflix began including putatively residential IP subnets in its blocklists.

Users who connect to a commercial VPN or proxy provider endpoint in another country can access content licensed for viewing in the endpoint country-but not in the viewer's own.

Netflix blocks known commercial VPNs and proxies from accessing its services in order to preserve its geofencing-partitioning access to content based on a user's real-world location.

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