Netflix occasionally yells at me while I’m trying to watch attack on titan through UK. It’s not a huge inconvenience, but it just makes me a little unsure of how secure my VPN is.
I’m not very knowledgeable on how networking is done but if someone knows would you mind giving me a quick summary of what’s going on here?
Netflix does not want you to use a VPN because this is a violation of their contract with some content providers regarding regional licensing of some content. To prevent this Netflix maintains certain lists of known/probable VPN endpoints. This list will contain the endpoints for many of the major providers (someone at Netflix or more likely a threat intel consultancy will get an account and just test each endpoint to see what its IP address is) and will also contain all of the advertised netblocks for major cloud providers like AWS, GCS, DigitalOcean, etc. The latter is because no residential customer will come from those IP addresses and they are used frequently by cheap VPN providers and regular users as easily set up VPN endpoints.
There are tricks that a VPN provider can perform to limit how much someone like Netflix can know about their endpoints, but in the end the endpoint has to have some visibility because it needs to send packets to Netflix servers. It is a game of whack-a-mole but Netflix has the advantage because there is a cost for a VPN provider setting up a server outside of a well-known cloud service or VPS address block and almost no cost to add another address to the block list.
If the provider advertises Netflix access then notify them and get some sort of partial refund for missed days, but consistently maintaining Netflix access is not a trivial task for a VPN provider.
If you are going to get a vpn, then just torrent or use real debrid.
Only a few VPNs can bypass the netflix VPN ban. Most will not work and result in users receiving the anonymous proxy tool error message