It's always good for a VPN to deny any information about the customer to a server, I would imagine that's not what was referred to as sketchy. Making a user indistinguishable from a typical user from country X is just the VPN doing its job correctly.

It seems, however, that at least some VPN providers use their customers' bandwidth without their knowledge to route other customers through it. I'd say that qualifies as sketchy.

Although on an entirely personal level, I'm not a fan of stuff like going through VPN to use Disney+. I think people should ideally either not watch or pirate geoblocked content. Consuming geoblocked content through VPNs is basically letting such companies get away with discrimination and still get your money.

Its much more difficult to take this stance when you live in a part of the world where such services are not available to you, just because of your LAT/LNG. Several times already I found myself "wanting" to pay for content, but the only way to get it was by circumventing geoblocking.

Why not pirate it instead?

I agree in principle, but sometimes it’s hard.

I pay a significant amount of money for MLB streaming, only to have many games blacked out. Due to various factors, I cannot legally get access to those games.

It figuratively kills me that I live in an area where three of the five closest teams to me are blacked out on MLB.tv but they're all far enough that it would take several hours of driving to actually go to a game in-person and the local TV stations don't air those games. It's actually pretty much completely killed my interest in baseball since I can't watch any of the teams I actually care about.

Isn't the vast majority of geoblocking due to regulations, legislation, or contract agreements? That hardly qualifies as "discrimination."

It's left over from a time before distribution over the internet was practical, when middle-men added value (local promotion, collection of royalties, etc) to video distrubution.

The internet made them largely redundant, but they still had their contracts and pushed to have things like geo-blocking to maintain their "local monopoly" arrangement.

When legal options are not readily available to me due to geo-blocking, I have no qualms about pirating instead.

I'm not arguing in favor of geographic blackouts, I'm arguing against them being "discrimination" by any sensible definition of the word. Nobody's sitting in an office somewhere trying to decide which sitcoms to block to most piss off the Armenians.

If they have to block you due to law, then sure since it's not their choice. Signing a contract however hardly makes it any less discriminatory. Signing a contract that means you now have to block Armenians is like signing a contract saying you won't allow Armenians into your store or will refuse to sell them stuff.

Just because this type of licensing contract is common in the media industry doesn't make it acceptable. People should just pirate whenever they hit a wall like that.

what's wrong with pirating geoblocked content in this case? if the owner actually believes that piracy == lost sales, this would be a signal that the person might have paid for the content if it were available in their locale.

Maybe my sentence was confusing, I think pirating is fine. (not watch) || pirate