I've been offering residential and business ISP services for a long time.
Hulu recently blocked my customers from accessing their service, because my
ARIN IP address blocks are "business class" instead of residential.
I've tried to find a contact for them as I am not a customer, the supportrequest@hulu.com address mentioned in NANOG previously is just
an autoresponder that says open a ticket online (once you are logged into your account).
Does anybody have a contact for them that I can discuss what they are
looking at to determine if my IP addresses are "residential"
vs. "business" class?
Doug, out of curiosity, what does Hulu do once they have classified your IP ranges as "business class"? Charge customers a different rate? Offer different content? Refuse service?
They won't let any of my customers connect, blocking them with a
specific error number to reference by their support. When they do, Hulu
is either telling them that they are using a VPN (when we don't offer
any services like that), and then to whitelist them, they have to have
a "residential" IP address and not the "business" IP address we are
giving them, and won't go any further. Or they just say they can't
connect from the "business" IP addresses.
If I knew why they considered my IP addresses "business" IP addresses,
I could possibly change something? But this seems to be an arbitrary
decision they changed about a week and a half ago for all my netblocks.
Thanks Doug. I'm interested in following your thread because we have some IP ranges we intentionally wanted to be classified as static or non-residential by other entities so that our customers on these ranges could operate their own email servers. This was done through a combination of reverse DNS including the word "static" (or similar) and the SpamHaus PBL listings (or similar). At the same time, we would not want Hulu to stop providing services to these customers due to this classification. Ultimately, I guess it's up to Hulu who they want to serve as a customer of theirs, but as a network operator providing access to to the internet (including access to services like Hulu) I'm sure we would be negatively impacted by such a decision on the part of Hulu causing to devalue the utility our services.
Many moons ago, I had a Tor *relay* running on one machine in my home network,
and Hulu decided that my connections from a *different* home machine were
"VPN". Now, if I were running a Tor *exit* node, I'd be totally OK with them
rejecting my non-Tor connections because they were NATed to the same outside IP
address - but Hulu should never have seen any packets from the relay and if I
*was* using a VPN I'd have a *different* IP address.
Near as I could determine, they were screen scraping the list of Tor relays
and conflating them with exit nodes. Never did figure out if it was stupidity
or malice driving that.
Never did figure out if it was stupidity
or malice driving that.
Personally I think it’s neither; it’s just $$$$$.
They could invest in a robust system to accurately identify what they chose not to allow to access the service. Or, they can choose to run with a ‘close enough’ system with some legitimate users caught in the middle.
They’ve most likely done the math and decided that the revenue lost from people getting caught up in inaccurate blocking is small enough that the investment in a more accurate method isn’t worth it. This is unfortunately the more common decision in this age of worship at the Altar of Maximum Shareholder Value.
I think you are exactly right here. It’s yet another example of how the incentives around DRM are all messed up and are creating economic bias in favor of screwing consumers as much as possible without loosing too much revenue.
What is needed is either a more conscientious consumer base that will see this and react by voting with their wallets, or, regulation which provides more costly penalties for screwing over legitimate consumers.
I suppose a Hulu subscriber could dispute the charge or file a suit (class action?) for damages: “Hulu took my money, but didn’t provide the services they advertised.” As an ISP, some of us might even be in a position where we encounter losses due to Hulu’s (mis)classification resulting in customers moving to the competition; I would think that would be sufficient grounds for a suit.
I suppose a Hulu subscriber could dispute the charge or file a suit (class action?) for damages: “Hulu took my money, but didn’t provide the services they advertised.” As an ISP, some of us might even be in a position where we encounter losses due to Hulu’s (mis)classification resulting in customers moving to the competition; I would think that would be sufficient grounds for a suit.
The problem here is that identifying class members is very hard (most class members wouldn’t realize why they were not getting Hulu, and Hulu probably either quickly corrects the problem on their end or blames the ISP), meaning they wouldn’t realize their ability to join the class.
As an individual customer, Hulu will refund your money and tell you to piss off. That’s about all you’re likely to recover in the court case, too.
As an ISP, there might be something there, but, you’d have to prove that you had a significant number of customers that left for that specific reason and you’d have to show the actual damages that resulted. Easy to estimate, very hard to prove.
So in this particular case, I think Hulu is tragically safe from being held accountable.
I think the best solution would be something like this…
If congress were to revise the DMCA to provide a provision similar to the following:
Digital Rights Management
Content producers and Content owners have the right to enforce their copyright through automated means
known as “Digital Rights Management” (DRM).
DRM mechanisms may include, but are not limited to any of the following:
IP Address based geographical location inference and content limitations
Efforts to avoid delivery of services to users of Virtual Private Networks
Software locks or limitations preventing playback based on machine configuration, software status,
or other variables.
Self-destructive content
Duties of Content Producers and Content Owners
Content producers and Content owners must, however, ensure that any form of DRM employed in this
process does not in any way curtail the legitimate rights of end users who have lawfully purchased,
licensed, or otherwise through fair use or other mechanism obtained legitimate rights to the content.
Rights of Consumers
The fair trade commission shall maintain a mechanism for consumers to report and document instances
where their content rights have been infringed, abridged, or otherwise hindered by DRM. Through this
process, the FTC shall investigate all credible complaints and make a determination of fact whether
the consumer’s rights were violated.
In such an instance where the FTC determines consumers rights were violated, the Content Owner,
Content Producer, and any Content Providers involved shall be jointly and severally liable for the following
damages:
Restitution to each affected consumer of the full cost (if any) born by the consumer in obtaining the
infringed rights.
A DRM free copy of the content in the same format(s) and usable with the same playback
mechanism(s) provided to each affected consumer.
A fine payable to the united States not to exceed $10,000 per incident per affected consumer.
Reimbursement to the FTC for all costs of the investigation and any process(es) related to
enforcement of any judgment resulting from the investigation.
In the event that a Content Owner, Producer, or Provider wishes to appeal an FTC ruling, the appeal
shall be heard in the circuit court of appeals covering the largest fraction of the affected consumers known
to be affected at the time of the ruling. While awaiting said hearing, the restitution to affected consumers
and DRM free copy shall be provided not less than 60 days after the initial ruling.
Not only hard to prove, but the armchair lawyer in my has an inkling that you'd have to show that they did it intentionally or went beyond being dumb or knowledgeable about it and were somehow negligent. The former seems even more difficult than proving actual damages, and the latter seems like it may not even apply or be possible.
What irks me most about these situations as an operator, and indeed something that may push back on my previous statement of intent or negligence not being possible/applicable, is that the services often make their geofencing/IP classification system failures out as being the fault of the user's telecommunications service provider when, in fact, the user's service provider often has absolutely no direct control over what happens and, even where they do have some form of direct control such as through a documented operations-appeals channel, are still at the mercy of the service doing the fencing/classification to correct the error. At minimum, this could damage customer good will toward their service provider.
(And kudos where it's due to the providers who do NOT make such issues appear to be the fault of the user's telecommunications service provider and instead provide a real, useful means for the user to directly contact the content provider to resolve the issue)
This is why you don’t go after Hulu. You go after the content owners who conspired to compel Hulu to limit distribution in a way that tortiously interferes with your contract with your eyeball customers. Then, before you’ve spent much money (filing lawsuits and notifying the defendants only costs in the hundreds of dollars), you suggest to their respective counsels that they didn’t actually intend to exclude your customers and that if Hulu weren’t so reckless in their implementation you’d be inclined to drop the matter.
This is why you don't go after Hulu. You go after the content owners who
conspired to compel Hulu to limit distribution in a way that tortiously
interferes with your contract with your eyeball customers. Then, before
Which in many cases is groups like the Screen Actors Guild and the music industry. As I understand it much of the music in TV shows require licensing and sometimes different license holders exist for a song depending on country.
While the television industry self-inflicts pain to it's userbase it's easier for the users to just pirate the content.
As an ISP, there might be something there, but, you’d have to prove that you had a significant number of customers that left for that specific reason and you’d have to show the actual damages that resulted. Easy to estimate, very hard to prove.
Not only hard to prove, but the armchair lawyer in my has an inkling that you'd have to show that they did it intentionally or went beyond being dumb or knowledgeable about it and were somehow negligent. The former seems even more difficult than proving actual damages, and the latter seems like it may not even apply or be possible.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but being dumb about it _IS_ negligent, isn’t it?
What irks me most about these situations as an operator, and indeed something that may push back on my previous statement of intent or negligence not being possible/applicable, is that the services often make their geofencing/IP classification system failures out as being the fault of the user's telecommunications service provider when, in fact, the user's service provider often has absolutely no direct control over what happens and, even where they do have some form of direct control such as through a documented operations-appeals channel, are still at the mercy of the service doing the fencing/classification to correct the error. At minimum, this could damage customer good will toward their service provider.
Yep… Hence what I proposed as regulation to help curtail this BS.
(And kudos where it's due to the providers who do NOT make such issues appear to be the fault of the user's telecommunications service provider and instead provide a real, useful means for the user to directly contact the content provider to resolve the issue)
Who are they? I want to shift my services to them if I can. (So far, I haven’t found any)
Am I the only one who's baffled in the context of a paid service why so much focus is put on where the consumption takes place (hard), and so little on where the transaction take place (easy)?
I understand, even if I don't necessarily always agree with, market segmentation, differentiated pricing, accurate P&L for different business units, etc, that mean for example if you're a US citizen you need to pay Disney US the prevailing US price to watch Disney content, but if you're an EU citizen you need to pay Disney EMEA the prevailing EU price to watch Disney content. Surely that transaction is the thing content creators and distributors care about?
If I, as a UK citizen, buy region 2 DVDs at home, take them on my trip to the US and watch them on my laptop, no-one is screaming that I'm violating someone's geographic distribution rights by doing so. If a US citizen is paying for Hulu, from a US billing address, on a US credit card, but happens to be watching from their hotel in Italy, why does anyone care?
I can see why it's different and more complicated for content that's provided free but geo-constrained (e.g. BBC iPlayer), but IP geolocation for paid services seems a terrible waste of time and effort on both sides.
Or am I woefully naive, and it's actually trivial for a non-US resident to come up with a US credit card and billing address to pay for the service?
Fair enough - thanks for the info. These days, you have to show up in person at a branch with a passport to open almost any kind of bank account here, following a money-laundering crackdown, so I was assuming it ought to be a sufficiently-strong check to satisfy rights-holders.
If I, as a UK citizen, buy region 2 DVDs at home, take them on my trip to the US and watch them on my laptop, no-one is screaming that I’m violating someone’s geographic distribution rights by doing so. If a US citizen is paying for Hulu, from a US billing address, on a US credit card, but happens to be watching from their hotel in Italy, why does anyone care?
Hulu probably doesn’t. But many content owners are still riding that Region Locking Hype Train in the face of all the available evidence that it doesn’t really do anything but create a nuisance. And they do pretty much have you over the barrel, since you likely don’t have another option.