The ban against bypassing geo restrictions by Netflix users might be working very well, but users are not too happy about it. Protests have been made in the past few days and months over the crackdown on VPNs and other proxies by privacy and security activists in many countries including the United States and Canada. Now another country is joining the fight against the VPN ban.
A year after introducing its services in Pakistan, and then later implementing the VPN ban in the country, Pakistani users are now feeling disgruntled by the ban. Users of the popular streaming service in the country who pay $7.99 every month to watch shows on Netflix feel the ban is unfair. When the Pakistani people received the news site last year, they were excited before they finally saw the number of movies and tv series they could watch all because they were in a certain location.
The VPN ban which the Netflix CEO, Hastings Reed, justified by saying that it is due to the company’s need to comply with the rules and regulations and also to honor their licensing agreements with content providers, has been present for over a year now. After the announcement of the VPN ban many of the engineers at Netflix started to look for ways to cut people’s connections to the VPNs they were using to get into the content they needed. And the rest from then is history. Users can’t access content that is not available in their geographical location.
The decision, however, has been met with widespread protest and now groups are passing over petitions which are against the ban of VPNs by the streaming service. The petition argues that Netflix is not the only reason people use VPNs, and the ban means they are compromising on their safety every time they want to make use of Netflix. The company that is responsible for the petition says that they have garnered around 45,226 signatures already. The organization has also sent a letter to the CEO of Netflix informing him of their actions.
The news comes a month after Hastings came out saying that the ban on VPNs was not impacting the company’s finances and the distress about the crackdown was only coming from a small and minor but vocal part of the Internet.