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Is anyone else completely unsatisfied with the "contact your ISP" method of customer service that Netflix seems to be using here? They are basically passing off

Is anyone else completely unsatisfied with the "contact your ISP" method of customer service that Netflix seems to be using here? They are basically passing off their issue (false positive VPN detection) to an unrelated company (and a company type that's notorious for poor customer service). Why should an ISP be responsible for figuring out why an IP ended up in Netflix's database? I would be pretty upset if that was the answer I got from Netflix customer service.

tyingq 5y ago
It felt like an attempt to convince customers that their ISPs were reporting them to Netflix.
adamcharnock 5y ago
As a small ISP I feel the same. If they block one of our IPs the we have to find someone who knows someone who knows someone at Netflix (Amazon, etc) to actually get something done about it. BUT, we launched with IPv6 support, which pretty much negates this whole issue for us when it comes to Netflix.
est31 5y ago
If they offered a customer service option to resolve such issues, probably 90% of requests would be from people who legitimately were VPN users. So they'd have to waste a lot of time to help the 10% of false positives affected. And ironically, the better they make their detection system at avoiding false positives, the more time they'd be wasting on that customer service. So maybe they invest more resources into making the detection system better instead of customer service. Also, this problem is probably ISP specific. If an ISP routes their global traffic over a globally shared pool of a couple public ipv4's via CGNAT for example, the ISP is virtually aiding the VPN providers which have obtained users from those ISPs. Netflix probably wants the ISP to stop doing that and instead chop up their public ipv4 pool into smaller pools so that they can ban individual sub-pools instead. The market position Netflix is in allows them to keep the users of small ISPs hostage in this situation. They only have to buckle in to large ISPs, if at all. Anyways, this is a silly waste of time really. People paid for content. People should be allowed to watch it. If they want to watch american shows instead, why not let them.

tyingq 5y ago

It felt like an attempt to convince customers that their ISPs were reporting them to Netflix.

adamcharnock 5y ago

As a small ISP I feel the same. If they block one of our IPs the we have to find someone who knows someone who knows someone at Netflix (Amazon, etc) to actually get something done about it. BUT, we launched with IPv6 support, which pretty much negates this whole issue for us when it comes to Netflix.

est31 5y ago

If they offered a customer service option to resolve such issues, probably 90% of requests would be from people who legitimately were VPN users. So they'd have to waste a lot of time to help the 10% of false positives affected. And ironically, the better they make their detection system at avoiding false positives, the more time they'd be wasting on that customer service. So maybe they invest more resources into making the detection system better instead of customer service. Also, this problem is probably ISP specific. If an ISP routes their global traffic over a globally shared pool of a couple public ipv4's via CGNAT for example, the ISP is virtually aiding the VPN providers which have obtained users from those ISPs. Netflix probably wants the ISP to stop doing that and instead chop up their public ipv4 pool into smaller pools so that they can ban individual sub-pools instead. The market position Netflix is in allows them to keep the users of small ISPs hostage in this situation. They only have to buckle in to large ISPs, if at all. Anyways, this is a silly waste of time really. People paid for content. People should be allowed to watch it. If they want to watch american shows instead, why not let them.