Netflix enrages Canada by actually following through with VPN crackdown plans

Tensions are rising betweenNetflixand the people of Canada onceagain this weekas more border-hoppingsubscribers find out first-handthatthe streaming service wasn't bluffing about that whole "VPN crackdown" thing.

This particular storm started brewing back in January, when Netflix announced that it would be taking steps to prevent members from using virtual private networks, proxies or unblocking services "to fool our systems into thinking they're in a different country than they're actually in."

As most non-American Netflix users well know, the streaming service offers each of its roughly190marketsdifferent volumes andtypes of programming based onregion-exclusive contentlicensing agreements.

At press time, Canadian Netflix users couldaccess approximately 4,000movies and shows, while nearly7,000titles were availableto subscribers in the U.S.

For many people, however,getting aroundgeo-restrictionsis as much about thequality of these titles as it is about quantity.

Since Netflix announced that it would be cracking down on customers who use VPNs,intermittent reports of payment problems with unblocking companieshave been rolling in alongside reports of Canadians finding ways around these problemsto continue watching U.S.-restrictedNetflixcontent.

This weekend, however, the tone among border-hopping Netflix viewerschanged.

Redditors and Twitter users have been frantically complaining of massive outages among subscription VPN services like Unblock-Us-com, whichaccording toPostmedia'sJimSlotek"seems to have had its access [to] U.S. Netflix crippled" as of Sunday.

Unblock-Us, which just two days ago wasactively apologizing to customers on Twitter and Facebook for outages, nowappears to have wiped all of the content from its Facebook page. Whilesome tweets replyingto customers remain intact, only one post,published Monday, can be seen by looking at the main Unblock-Us Twitterfeed.

"We're happy to help you 24/7!" it reads."Please direct all your questions to https://support.unblock-us.com/."

TorrentFreak addressed this increase in Netflix-based VPNoutage reports on Tuesday, writing that it had"spoken to several VPN service providers who have seen an increase in blocking efforts over the past several weeks."

"Initially Netflix used static addresses for the geo-blocking checks. As a result, proxy and VPN operators could easily bypass these checks by forwarding this traffic to a 'clean' IP-address," the filesharing news site explained. "However, Netflix recently updated its detection methods and now uses hundreds of regularly changing domains."

Adding insult to injury,Netflix CEO Reed Hastings blew off concerns over the VPN crackdown and how it might affect business during a live-streamed earnings call on Monday.

"It's a very small but quite vocal minority,"Hastings said of Netflix subscriberswho use VPNs to access U.S. content from outside the country."It's really inconsequential to us."

Judging by the volume of angry online chatter about this issue in recent weeks, that "vocal minority" maynot remain inconsequential to the company's bottom line forever.

Pricehikes are one thing but beingrelegated to the Netflix D-List with no recourse?That's enough to drive some customers straight back into the arms oftorrentsor maybe even DVD stores.)

Shares in Netflix were down by about 10per cent onTuesday as investors digested the company's latest quarterly earnings and predictions that it would onlyadd 2.5 millionnew customers during the nextquarter,a much lower figure than the almost seven million customers it added during the first.

It looks like Canadians can't be placated withStar Wars: The Force Awakensafter all especially when homegrownshows (likeDegrassi)can only be viewed onNetflixby Americans.