Netflix expanded its services to the rest of the world earlier this month and this move was met with praise and criticism alike, the criticism mainly from national regulatory bodies. In this new incident, an Indian telco company announced they will block the service on its internet platforms.
According to Indotelko, Dian Rachmawan, a director of Telkom was quoted as saying that Netflix was blocked for not heeding to regulations and for pornographic content.
This incident is a reminisce of what happened in Kenya earlier where the Kenya Film Classification board wanted the streaming service to be regulated since it contravened the board’s regulations. This resulted in a discussion of how to regulate Netflix where the new ICT Cabinet Secretary, Joe Mucheru stated that the board lacked the policies to regulate the service.
Netflix too has a dilemma of its own thanks to the expanded market and it is the case of VPNs. The company started a war against VPNs due to the fact that since now more and more people are on the service, VPNs have become useful to watch content that is not available in their countries. Reports of the VPN shutdown have only started streaming in like the case in Australia where a VPN service reported of cases where customers complained they could not view content intended for the US market.
Netflix customers are the on the receiving end of this two maelstroms where the streaming service is being targeted by regulatory agencies in the new markets and the subsequent blacklisting of VPNs by the company. We can only hope that the issues will be sorted by the two players by the end of the year so as to enjoy watching TV shows and movies on the platform.
