Comment by eddythompson80

> As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?

Yep, they are all lying to you, but with a wiggle room for a workaround or to point the blame at Netflix. Once you get in, you'll notice that Netflix, Prime Video, Steam, some of YouTube, and pretty much any legitimate service with geo-fencing not working. You then email support complaining that this is not working for you. The answer varies depending on the company. For example:

- Private Internet Access will try to up sell you for your own static IP. That hopefully remains undiscovered by Netflix et al for a bit. (Obviously you're trading anonymity and privacy aspects of a VPN if it's a static ip attached to you, but I don't think people trying to stream Netflix from Italy or where ever care about that)

- Mullvad will tell you: yeah that doesn't work. We never advertised that. Don't renew next month.

- Proton will keep asking you to try endpoints manually (each country has hundreds of endpoints and their app picks a random one. Just keep trying different ones manually. They might give your account access to some "new endpoints" (if they have them) that are not blocked yet. Hopefully once the refund period has passed, they will tell you "sorry we're having trouble with Netflix currently. we're working on it"

Some of them will suggest using "another streaming service??" because "Netflix is having issues in [INSERT_COUNTRY]"