Keep in mind the companies don't want to go through the hassle, it's the copyright legislation that's the foundation of all this mess. On Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 12:57 PM Joe Greco via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
On Sat, Aug 23, 2025 at 09:31:56AM -0700, jay--- via NANOG wrote:
On 8/23/25 08:40, nanog--- via NANOG wrote:
It's a basic principle of a free market that you cannot force someone to provide service. If Netflix wants to ban certain IP ranges at random, they're allowed to do that and the only recourse is whining.
Customers in those random IP ranges who are paying for the service would beg to differ. They're paying for a service which Netflix intentionally is refusing to provide, based on erroneous data from a third party hired by Netflix.
That starts to sound vaguely like a tortious interference claim, but seeing as how Netflix hired the third party, I think it pretty much winds up as a "my streaming provider sucks" issue. It's not shocking that VPN providers are capitalizing on this sort of thing, that web browsers are now coming with VPN services integrated, and that customers have no idea what sort of reasoning to use a VPN service is actually rational and justifiable.
Part of the problem is that the term "IP address" was chosen instead of "IP number" or "IP identifier". It leads to the false assumption that an "address" relates to a physical location.
Or that an IP address uniquely identifies some particular individual? I would hope that this sort of nonsense has been put to bed with the advent of CGNAT and all that. Your average everyday man on the street is not going to understand (or care about) the finer points. Heck, I've run into network folks who don't understand how I can have servers with adjacent addresses on opposite ends of the continent. If we're going to talk about geolocation of IP's, perhaps we should start out with the basic understanding that accurately identifying endpoint locations is actually a really difficult thing to do from outside the network. As network designers, we've failed to come up with a reasonable way to reliably do this, which leads to an issue when Netflix acquires regional streaming rights to content and then has to make best effort attempts to enforce those regional boundaries.
We might have had a shot at this with 1876, though that could still easily be screwed up by NAT, since you can't really guarantee locality of the endpoints behind a NAT. Plus setting up LOC records for all yer IP's is laughably unlikely to happen, raises new privacy concerns, etc.
... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"-Asimov _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list
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