Probably not, but remember Netflix is constantly having to negotiate new contracts with the content providers. If they don’t feel like Netflix is doing enough, they won’t negotiate another deal, or they will demand more money in return. Netflix will use their success at blocking VPNs as a negotiating tool.
I honestly think they are using the copyright lawyers as a scapegoat.
The have to do all sorts of Infrastructure tricks and optimizations to have the performance that they currently do.
They most likely realized they had a non-insignificant number of vpn connections (that can change country in short notice) and this probably introduced a massive spanner in the works on their Infrastructure/Optimizations.
I doubt the studios understand half of what Netflix has to do backend wise to appreciate any of it on a negotiation table.
There's no reason why VPN's would create any engineering headache for Netflix at all. So no, Netflix has absolutely zero engineering reason to crack down on VPN's.
And the studios are a lot smarter than you think, they've been doing regional licensing for a long time now. Everyone doing negotiations knows VPN's are the tool to get around region restrictions, and any exec can just ask their assistant or teenage kid to sign up for a handful of VPN services and see if they're able to watch Netflix through it. VPN's aren't some secret only hackers know about, they've had widespread consumer use for a long time.
The studios don't need to understand much of what Netflix is doing on the backend. They just put in the contract that Netflix must make all reasonable effort to ensure region restrictions can't be evaded via VPN, maintaining up-to-date lists of blocked IP ranges, which will be periodically verified via e.g. the current top 10 most popular VPN providers.
It's all quite simple and straightforward. No scapegoating.
I wish it would be made transparent how Netflix acquired the licence and made that contract transparent. I would evade media with unreasonable enforcement that doesn't live up to the modern world of media anyway.
