New Zealand ISP admits its free VPN exists just so people can watch Netflix
Damn. You kiwis may have balls-slow internet, but at least your ISPs care about your business.
I wish American ISPs would do things that would make us like them. As it is, if things don’t change, by the end of the decade I wouldn’t be surprised if Australia and New Zealand had faster average speeds than we do.
edit: Apparently NZ’s average speed is 20Mbps, compared to Australia’s 15Mbps and the USA’s 25Mbps. So they aren’t even that slow.
How generous. Here in indonesia we block vimeo, reddit, imgur and most porn related sites. Yes they blocked vimeo, reddit and imgur because they contain porn… Uhhhh Facebook? YouTube?
The minister believes porn ruins the minds of the future generation.
When I worked in the Middle East, most companies had a proxy or VPN service purely to get around web censorship. When you’re running a business you can’t afford to let some fuck-wit conservative ban a web service your company relies on.
Most employees used the same service at home.
The national telco tried to block things like Skype because it competed with their long distance call service. There are so many expat workers in that part of the world they made a killing off long distance.
Upvote cause New Zealand got mentioned
I find it sad that corporations are creating invisible barrier to prevent people from legitimately buying/seeing content from another location. I don’t know it just feel unhumanitarian.
People just do this? Make the Internet work?
What kind of monsters are they?
My ISP in Canada freely admits that its free VPN is just so people can torrent without throttling.
Neat, but there’s no way this is going to be there for much longer now that it’s news. I don’t think Netflix can legally allow it, right?
There’s an ISP in Iceland that does this as well. They call it Lúxusnet (Luxury Internet) and it enables those customers that have it turned on to access blocked websites like Netflix, Hulu etc.
Info (in Icelandic) here: http://luxusnet.tal.is/
They don’t charge extra for it.
Woah I worked for this isp back when I was in nz…nicely done guys …Slingshot may not be a big player in nz but they do know how to keep their plans and features competitive
I was sure it was so the hobbits could use google maps.
I’m a Slingshot subscriber and I have to say, Global Mode certainly hasn’t worked for me. I’ve had it turned on for about 5 months and i certainly haven’t been able to access Netflix or Hulu. I’ve got my fingers crossed (I’m a Canadian and so know more than most what we’re missing down here).
This is why you make your service available globally. People want your music/movies/TV/whatever. If you restrict access geographically, they’ll find a way to get it, whether that’s a VPN, piracy, or something else. They spend a whole bunch of money trying to restrict content when they could be making money by selling it to a wider market.
Edit: This was directed at the content creators, publishers, distributors, etc, not Netflix and Netflix alone. There’s obviously an issue with content distribution in general when ISPs have VPNs so that the users can access Netflix, while other people are simultaneously moaning about how much money they’ve ‘lost’ from people pirating their content.
Make the content available or someone will make it available without your permission. I’m not sure why media rights holders fail to understand this, in this day and age distribution is easy.
That was a stupid thing to admit.
Of course people are gonna use it for things like that, but making it sound like it’s official policy just makes it more difficult to continue doing it.
Good on you slingshot.
New Zealand just got additional points to my “Best countries to live in” list.
Can someone explain this news to me in layman’s terms? Thanks.