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Comment by nissehulth | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, the simple answer is "yes".

I used to use a VPN to watch US Netflix, but they started to block known VPNs and I didn't feel like spending time on workarounds. On the other hand, downloading the latest episode of some TV series takes only a few mouse clicks. For sure easier than fighting geo-restrictions.

I still pay for Netflix, but doesn't really watch it much because of the tiny catalog available to me locally, I simply want to support them. Perhaps it will make me feel better if I would download any of their content. :)

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>Sadly, the simple answer is "yes".

>I simply want to support them.

Nothing to be sad about. Also curious, why do you want to support them ? Being a market leader, Netflix is a unique position to influence some of these regressive practices. More support is clearly not helping; it's only making it worse by creating monopolies that exert even more negative influence.

The biggest problem with Netflix is that it is not able to obtain rights for a lot of movies or series so you don't have a full catalog. So series and movies are fragmented between providers or totally unavailable.

Netflix is not much of a market leader until it contains at least 90% of the movies i want to watch, which can't happen without enough leverage from their part given by user support.

I do like some of their own content. I also like their general business model and I believe (well, I hope) that the stupid geo-restrictions are results of old-school licensing and not active business decisions made by Netflix.

But ofc, I wouldn't mind if they had some real competition, I don't want a monopoly.

>(well, I hope) that the stupid geo-restrictions are results of old-school licensing and not active business decisions made by Netflix.

Geo-restrictions have existed forever. What Netflix started was actively blocking entire ranges of IPs belonging to vpns and commercial ISPs (cloud providers like aws, dedicated servers like ovh etc.). This should fall under some corollary to net-neutrality where a service cannot discriminate between ISPs. Does such a corollary exist in countries that have some form of net neutrality (US, India, Netherlands etc.) ? Can someone with legal expertise comment ? From my standpoint, they can have geo-licensing, but should stick with some consistent way of showing content either based on billing info or IP. Blocking out vast portions of the internet because it doesn't suit them should clearly be some violation of laws like net neutrality.

There is a proposal in the EU that would prevent "unjustified geo-blocking" but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to become law.

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