Never did figure out if it was stupidity
or malice driving that.

Personally I think it's neither; it's just $$$$$.  

They could invest in a robust system to accurately identify what they chose not to allow to access the service. Or, they can choose to run with a 'close enough' system with some legitimate users caught in the middle. 

They've most likely done the math and decided that the revenue lost from people getting caught up in inaccurate blocking is small enough that the investment in a more accurate method isn't worth it. This is unfortunately the more common decision in this age of worship at the Altar of Maximum Shareholder Value. 

On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 12:20 AM Valdis Klētnieks <valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote:
On Tue, 19 Nov 2019 13:39:56 -0500, Tom Beecher said:

> They are essentially equating 'business' with 'VPN provider'.

Not at all surprised.

Many moons ago, I had a Tor *relay* running on one machine in my home network,
and Hulu decided that my connections from a *different* home machine were
"VPN".  Now, if I were running a Tor *exit* node, I'd be totally OK with them
rejecting my non-Tor connections because they were NATed to the same outside IP
address - but Hulu should never have seen any packets from the relay and if I
*was* using a VPN I'd have a *different* IP address.

Near as I could determine, they were screen scraping the list of Tor relays
and conflating them with exit nodes. Never did figure out if it was stupidity
or malice driving that.