[Cerowrt-devel] [Bloat] OT: Netflix vs 6in4 from HE.net

[Colin Dearborn]

HE IPv6 space has been tagged as a vpn type service by Netflix, since it has users all over the world, but it's space is all geolocated in the US. If HE had geolocated the blocks of each POP to the country the POP resided in, and put some rules around geolocation of using each POP (IE Canadian residents can only use Canadian POPs) this could have been avoided, but it also would have been a large amount of work on HE's side just to make geolocation accurate-ish.

Fortunately, my ISP got IPv6 working natively shortly after Netflix started blocking HE's space, so I didn't have to suffer for too long (but lost my US netflix.)

Content licensing is a very complex thing. While you might believe that your subscription equals the license, in reality the license is the agreement between Netflix and the content providers. Content providers put strict geolocation rules of where content can be played on Netflix, and Netflix can be sued by them if it appears that they're not doing enough to protect these rules. This is to protect the value of the content providers content, when they sell it to someone other than Netflix, or start their own streaming service.  For example, in Canada, we have a streaming service called Crave. There's a lot of content on there that would be available to Netflix in the States, so if Netflix didn't properly adhere to geolocation rules, Crave could legitimately either sue Netflix directly, or get the content provider to do it for them (again, depending on the licensing agreement).
This is why when you travel, you get the local Netflix content, not the content of the country where you pay the subscription.

Your option of using a cloud server may work. :)


This might turn out to be a problem for me - I have a "smart TV" that I watch Netflix on, and it appears to use IPv4. What specifically triggers Netflix to reject specific IPv6 clients? Is it the player's IPv6 address? Is all of he.net's address space blocked?

I've been planning to move more of my home networks to routed IPv6.

In principle, Netflix as a business shouldn't care - it's just doing its best efforts to protect its content's licensing requirements. So if I'm actually in the US, and my net claims correctly to be in US (by whatever trickery I use), neither Netflix nor I am violating any license from a legal point of view.

So all I need to do would be to get a legit US IPv6 address (I have one /64 on a public cloud server), and tunnel it to my house and give it to my TV. Not ideal, but until Netflix does its geofencing *correctly* according to the license, rather than according to IP address, I'd say it's a proper thing.



On Saturday, March 21, 2020 8:47pm, "Rich Brown" <richb.hanover at gmail.com> said:

>  I love knowing smart people.
>
> Yes, it does appear to be Netflix geo-fencing their services. Given that I only
> watch Netflix on one computer, I am taking Sebastian's advice and turning off IPv6
> DNS queries in Firefox.
>
> Thanks again for these responses.
>
> Rich
>
>> On Mar 21, 2020, at 6:14 PM, Sebastian Moeller <moeller0 at gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Rich,
>>
>> since it seems to be IPv6 related, why not use firefox for netflix and disable
>> IPv6 in firefox (see
>> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-cant-load-websites-other-browsers-can#w_ipv6)
>> maybe that works well enough?
>>
>> Best Regards
>>      Sebastian
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Mar 21, 2020, at 21:20, Rich Brown <richb.hanover at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> to Bloat & CeroWrt folks: This is a little OT for either of these lists, but I
>>> figured there are plenty of experts here, and I would be delighted to get your
>>> thoughts.
>>>
>>> I just tried to view a Netflix movie and got a F7111-5059 error message. This
>>> prevented the video from playing. (As recently as a month or two ago, it worked
>>> fine.)
>>>
>>> Googling the error message gets to this page
>>> https://help.netflix.com/en/node/54085 that singles out use of an IPv6 Proxy
>>> Tunnel.
>>>
>>> Sure enough, I'm have a 6in4 tunnel through Hurricane Electric on WAN6. Stopping
>>> that WAN6 interface caused Netflix to work.
>>>
>>> What advice could you offer? (I could, of course, turn off WAN6 to watch movies.
>>> But that's a drag, and other family members couldn't do this.) Many thanks.
>>>
>>> Rich
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Bloat mailing list
>>> Bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net
>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat
>>
>
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