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Comment by mitkebes | Hacker News Reader

Does double VPN get around these kind of blocks? My understanding is the VPNs are expected to block the websites for french users, but it sounds like people could use VPN #1 to appear as a non-french user to VPN #2. VPN #2 can then allow the user to access the blocked websites, because the law only applies to french users.

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this isn't explicitly stated but from context I understand that this is just DNS block.

so using vpn provider with some other DNS provider should be enough

there is also tor that is free and cannot be controlled in this way

Is there some reason they wouldn't just use a VPN that isn't in France and therefore isn't subject to laws in France? There have to be VPNs in some other jurisdiction.

I don't think e.g. NordVPN has any offices in France, but in theory the French authorities could tell French ISPs to block access to nordvpn.com (and all other Nord domains), though I'm not sure if the law applies to "secondary services" (instead of ordering ISPs to block domains that offer pirated sports streams, they'd be told to block domains that offer a service to circumvent the block).

I believe Russia is doing it like this, trying to connect to a VPN provider's website will fail - interestingly NordVPN's app uses SSO to login, so blocking their main site would block the app's ability to log in.

Every VPS provider is "a service to circumvent the block" because you can configure one as a VPN in around 30 seconds, and these are all just legitimate foreign companies many of which use Cloudflare or other shared IP services for their own websites. Are you going to block AWS and Azure and everything on them because US-region instances don't implement French website blocks? You've gone from blocking a couple of pirate sites to blocking >95% of the internet.

> Are you going to block AWS and Azure and everything on them because US-region instances don't implement French website blocks

*French shrug*

I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users. At the moment a French resident wanting to watch these games without paying can just install VPN, connect to it, and watch the pirate streams. If the VPN providers are forced to comply, having a VPS is still a viable option, but for a casual user it's complicated enough that it might be enough to significantly reduce the number of pirate-stream watchers.

Then again, because of Internet censorship in e.g. China, Iran and Russia, there are several services designed for a 1-click install of a personal VPN on a VPS...

> I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users.

This is always the excuse, but how does that ever work? People want to be able to do it, technical people know how to do it, non-technical people ask them to do it for them. If the number of non-technical people is large, a single one the technical people will make a one-click installer to automate it so they don't have to keep doing it manually for people, and then the inconvenience is gone for everyone.

The companies peddling this stuff are desperate to rationalize that it can do any good. A million games will have DRM and their customers will hate it and they'll collectively lose billions of dollars by inconveniencing legitimate customers or have people pirating their stuff out of spite when they would have actually bought it. Then some game doesn't get cracked for a while because it's a statistical anomaly or it's just not very popular and nobody bothers and they get to congratulating themselves without ever considering how many of the people who didn't pirate that game actually bought it instead of just pirating a different one, or if the number of people who bought it is smaller than the number of sales they lost through destruction of goodwill -- for not only that game but also all the games that were cracked right away.

And then they double down with this kind of website blocking overreach where they're unapologetically causing collateral damage to innocent people as if to demonstrate just how little they care about anything but the dubious pretense that it was worth it.

I think it's more likely they put pressure on Visa, Mastercard and French banks. If their choice is severing the relationship with Nord VPN versus the entirety of France, they'll choose the former. Losing Visa access would be very bad for Nord's business, so I think they'd rather comply.

The VPN provider could obviously just accept cryptocurrency from users in France, so is the theory that France is going to threaten Visa with not accepting Visa anywhere in France if Visa doesn't block foreign VPN providers in foreign countries from accepting Visa from foreign users? How would even that be effective, since you would only need one VPN service to choose "stop accepting Visa"?

Does this mean a VPN company that doesn't have a legal nexus in France, or just a VPN provider that lets you use VPN servers not in France? If the latter, I do that anyway to watch region-locked cycling, frequently connecting to SBS in Australia, but also sometimes different European countries where streaming is (has been in the past) free.

Just use a VPN that's not on the list. It is also will be useful to learn other ways to get around internet censorship which people use in the countries like China and Russia

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