They actively marketed their product up until recently as being able to circumvent geo-restrictions, and actively helped users who had problems. That for me was the big sell.
Whilst I understand that it's a cat and mouse game now between content providers and VPN providers, they have built up a large customer base - based upon this premise.
And now they switch that they have customers and don't want to play this expensive game anymore.
Do you feel that they are obligated to never change the terms or discontinue certain policies once implemented for the lifetime of the company? What company would ever want to operate in such an environment where they had to make all decisions up-front and those decisions were set in stone until the end of time? Is the price also set in stone until the end of time?
Many of these same providers have just blocked VPN IPs and you can still use a cheap VPS to circumvent though. Some nice docker openvpn containers around...
It's not the content providers but the movie studios, music labels and rights holders and so forth. Netflix doesn't really care about users circumventing geo restrictions, otherwise it wouldn't be so easy
0 - http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/business/netflix-crackdown-unblo...
Not complying means they would face severe enough penalties to sink the business (notwithstanding the risk of jail-time.)