Slashdot carried a story earlier this week about the popular television/movie streaming site Hulu blocking access to visitors coming from the Witopia VPN service, which has multiple endpoints in the U.S. as well as in the U.K. and Hong Kong. Also picked up by Australian site PC Authority, the block is notable because it appears to be the first against a pay-for-use SSL VPN; both stories cite multiple blocks against free SSL VPNs in the past, including Hotspot Shield.
Several technical aspects of the Internet have some sort of regionalization to them. Domain names can sometimes indicate what country the site originates from or is intended for — the main BBC website (bbc.co.uk) originates from the United Kingdom, while Microsoft’s Canadian site (microsoft.ca) uses a different domain name from their U.S. site (microsoft.com). IP blocks can indicate a geographical area — Comcast, for instance, has specific IP blocks for its northern Virginia or Philadelphia markets. In general, though, the Internet is as unbounded and geographically invisible as the underlying infrastructure. If all of the trans-Atlantic links were simultaneously severed, a user in New York could still get to the website of the French Prime Minister (presumably hosted in France) because the traffic would be re-routed through an alternate route, a clever resiliency mechanism which the user would never notice except for a noticeably slower connection.
Region blocks defy the very concept of the Internet — a communications medium meant to eliminate distance and borders, and facilitate the sharing of information. From a technical perspective, they are resource-intensive to implement on even the most basic level, and impossible to enforce accurately. If an IP block gets reallocated and effectively “moves” from one country to another, it could throw off a so-called whitelist or blacklist of allowed or not-allowed IP addresses. Or, as is the above case, the source is hiding his or her true IP by using a VPN or proxy, in which case blocking the VPN or proxy may block legitimate users.
Region blocking, then, is a futile arms race with users. And it is notable that those playing the arms race are media owners — Hulu, BBC (iPlayer), ESPN/Disney (ESPN360.com), among others — trying desperately to maintain control of their content. Television producers have gradually lost sleep over the years, first from the VCR, then from DVD recorders, TV tuner cards for computers, DVRs, etc., and now the widespread availability of broadband Internet and the popularity of Bittorrent mean that people don’t even need a television to watch the latest episode of Lost or House. Considering that the broadcast networks have a single revenue stream (advertising) for their on-air programming and the cable networks have two (advertising and subscribers, generally a cut from the cable/satellite operators), it’s not hard to believe that network executives are scared as crap that torrents of TV episodes are killing their revenue streams. (Yes, they can make money on syndication and DVD sales, but those don’t kick in until after the episode first airs, if not much later.)
So what we have here is a classic case of old school versus new school. As has been shown many times over the past decade and a half, advertising as a primary model for free stuff on the Internet is a very dangerous model to rely on. Ad rates are so vastly different between television and the Internet that there’s no comparison. People want to watch their favourite shows when they want, not on Mondays at 9pm because the network says so, and if you miss it and don’t have a DVR, sucks to be you. Fifteen minutes of commercials are quickly going the way of the dodo, not just due to DVRs and re-edited episodes passed around via Bittorrent, but because the networks realize that Internet users watching on Hulu simply won’t tolerate it.
To be fair, the networks — who generally own licensing and broadcast rights for shows — have a legitimate reason for the geographic limitations. Take, for example, the BBC sci-fi drama Torchwood, which is aired natively in and licensed out of the U.K. The BBC’s sister network in the U.S., the for-profit and non-government-affiliated BBC America, traditionally gets first broadcast rights for Torchwood, though it is not allowed to preempt U.K. viewers. Now imagine that BBC makes a deal with Hulu to offer Torchwood online. Wouldn’t you feel screwed over too? Licensing restrictions can even cause problems for DVD releases, too — for instance, I’ve had the Natalie MacMaster: Live in Cape Breton DVD in my Netflix queue for longer than I can remember, likely a year or more. Why is it still unavailable? The content owner can’t find or refuses to sign an agreement with a distributor in the United States, so no one has rights to the DVD in the U.S. Since intellectual property laws vary from country to country, content owners face a complex route to licensing content in various regions.
Ultimately, content owners and legislators must accept that media globalization arrived some time ago, and laws and industry practices simply don’t work in this age of technology. Region blocking is a type of security, and as any practitioner of information security knows, it is impossible to provide 100% protection — you will either miss some of the outsiders or block some of your insiders, but never achieve the perfect balance. Blocking pay-for-use SSL VPNs is, in my opinion, the nuclear option — now that Hulu et al. are messing with users paying hard-earned money to watch what many of them can’t, I assure you that those users will force them to play whack-a-mole (and we all know how well that game works with technology) or turn to Bittorrent and alternative means that deprive Hulu’s advertisers of eyeballs.
