> Actually, most of the time your VPN is just going to be blocked entirely by the service

Actually, my experience is Netflix blocks some of the time; Wikipedia blocks (edits) all of the time (which really pisses me off - I'm logged in!); and nothing else that I use blocks me.

Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IPBE, which lets you apply for the right to circumvent blocks of IP addresses.

>Actually, most of the time your VPN is just going to be blocked entirely by the service

Doesn't seem to be the case 'most of the time' for non-free VPNs or at least mine. You can definitely access YouTube videos available abroad or BBC iPlayer or whatever. I'm on VPN a 3rd of the time and it's only very occasionally I have issues. Sure, maybe it's worse with some services but not 'most of the time'.

I am doing an implied integral here over over all random VPN services and servers, as the person I am replying to said that "any" VPN would work. If you have found one that seems to consistently work for the BBC--and based on their efforts against Disney+, I bet NordVPN would work?--you are now a single data point: if you search for BBC blocked VPN on Google, however, you will see that it is an extremely common issue that the BBC blacklists VPNs from accessing their service.

(FWIW, I could accept an argument that I am not "weighting" my certainly-informal statement well on actual usage figures: if NordVPN and ExpressVPN are even the only two VPNs that work well against the BBC, maybe they are alone a considerable percentage of the market. I am pushing back on the idea that "any" VPN would work, and so I am looking more at the idea of choosing a random brand, equally weighted.)

Actually, you are right. I just tried again and now only 1 of my ips works for BBC so they are clearly getting more aggressive (or my provider hasn't been changing them as often recently).

FoxyProxy guarantees BBC iplayer access and gives you other servers when it stops working.

Yep, but Amazon for instance blocks first party content when accessing it via a VPN. Some delivery services block my VPN outright.

I wonder if this will continue with Apple (and my guess is other similarly sized tech companies) offering VPN. In other words, shutting out Apple's VPN might mean losing 5-10% of your market? Probably not but it will certainly be a new situation for so many non-tech people to have easy access to a VPN and Apple likely pushing it as "good for your privacy"

Apple's VPN explicitly maps users to an IP with a [relatively] close IP address[0] (as in, for IP geolocation purposes), and does minimal actual proxying:

> In iOS 15 and macOS 12, Private Relay will apply to all web browsing in Safari, all DNS name resolution queries, and a small subset of traffic from apps.

> Specifically, this will include all insecure HTTP traffic, such as TCP port 80.

So I can see most services not needing to block iCloud Private Relay.

0: https://mask-api.icloud.com/egress-ip-ranges.csv

At some point, we're going to have more and more users behind NAT and IP address looks even worse as a device for banning someone. Them making impossible journeys and changing country every five minutes, however, provides more useful information.