One of the only ways to protect your right to privacy and information online is to use a VPN. Some websites infringe on those rights by blocking VPNs, but they do it for a good reason.
The big names that are notorious for blacklisting VPNs are Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and the BBC. It’s hard to figure out exactly how many websites block VPN access, but the number could be in the thousands. Most of these sites aren’t actively at war with VPNs, but they manage to blacklist a lot of VPN IP addresses over time passively.
Remind Me, What’s a VPN?
Before going into this, you’ll want to know what IP addresses are and how VPNs work. We’ll keep this brief. When you connect to the internet through a router, you’re given an IP address. This address, essentially, identifies your computer or router so that websites know where you’re connecting from and can send traffic back to you. The IP address that you’re assigned at home is different from the IP address that you’re assigned at a coffee shop.
When you use a VPN (virtual private network), you’re effectively tunneling all of your online activity through a remote server. Your service provider can’t see what you’re doing online, because the traffic is encrypted and funneled through a remote server. Websites can’t see your actual IP address; they can only see the IP address of the server that’s masking your activity. So if your VPN funnels your activity through a server that’s in a different state or country, websites think that you’re connecting from said state or country.
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Blocking VPNs Is Easy
It’s common for websites to locate and track users based on their IP addresses. IP tracking is an easy way to increase account security, build targeted advertisements, and show users different content depending on the country in which they live. This practice of IP tracking is one of the main reasons why people use VPN services, but it’s also the reason why blocking VPN access to a website is so easy.
A VPN service owns a limited number of IP addresses. And since most VPN servers use IPv4 (an outdated IP address protocol), it’s difficult to generate unique IP addresses, and a pool of subscribers are often sharing the same IP addresses for months or years at a time. Websites that want to blacklist VPNs simply need to use services like ipinfo to block IP addresses that have been used by multiple different users.
There are two other ways that websites can blacklist VPNs, but these methods aren’t as common as IP blocking. One method, called port blocking, requires websites to figure out the exit ports that VPNs are using for all of their IP addresses. Port blocking is easy and effective because most VPNs use the 1194 OpenVPN port. Another method, called deep-packet inspection, checks users’ metadata for cryptography signatures. These signatures are like the fingerprints of VPN services, and hiding them is difficult.
Contracts Force Streaming Sites To Ban VPNs
Again, the most notorious VPN blacklisters are Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and the BBC. All of these websites stream media, and they all blacklist VPNs to honor regional contracts with licensing companies.
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Source : Why Do Some Websites Block VPNs?
