INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
VPNs have been around almost as long as the internet itself
From the earliest of days, the desire for security within the enterprise market created a market within enterprise solutions for end-to-end
first is the ability to shield your browsing behaviour from outside eyes (for example your ISP, who may go on and sell it to the highest
the case of the latter, the issue is much more debatable
There is sympathy in many quarters for browsers in more repressive territories to be able to beat the censor by accessing more objective
news about what is happening in their home or even around the world.Foreign online streamingHowever, this noble cause is also often used as
a smoke screen for probably the most common reason that anyone signs up for a VPN: the desire to watch content from a foreign online
streaming service more conveniently / cheaper than is available at home.Data from GlobalWebIndex back in 2015 (yes 2015) indicated that
Netflix has 100 million users from China, without their even having a Chinese service! (ed: Netflix has just under 104 million active users
as of Q2 2017).Although that number may well have been inflated as a result of Chinese users signing up multiple times for the free two week
trial (theoretically for US-based viewers!) there can be no question that VPN usage to beat geo-filtering systems and thus access content
from abroad, has become very common.As bandwidth has increased, the quality and popularity of online streaming sites has grown and for the
same reason (better bandwidth) so has the popularity of VPNs to enable viewers to sign into their digital global passports to browse the
content exclusively on a territory-by-territory basis, the harm that is being done to the creative industries from this abuse cannot be just
clamp down that Netflix made in early 2016 shows just what is possible to ensure that content can be made more resistant to VPN based
that solutions exist to stop it grows, our prediction is that the days of this use case for VPNs at least, are numbered.David Briggs is the
