Undeterred by the failure to geo-block Australian users from the US Netflix catalogue the next step is to enable payment providers to refuse to process payments from Australians.

PayPal for one appears to have caved to Netflix’s requests and is now geo-blocking payments for US sites.

PayPal, one of many such payment providers has stated, ‘Under the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that infringe or violate any copyright, trademark, right of publicity or privacy, or any other proprietary right under the laws of any jurisdiction. This includes transactions for any device or technological measure that descrambles a scrambled work, decrypts an encrypted work or otherwise avoids, bypasses, removes, deactivates or impairs a technological measure without the authority of the copyright owner’.

PayPal has contacted one VPN service (Canadian UnoTelly), advising that it will stop processing payments because of copyright concerns. Although only a temporary victory for Netflix, international customers can change payment options to other methods – including US Gift cards.

Australian Netflix un-blockers are popular as they make the user account look like a US one and can therefore access around 90% more content than Australian content library. Australian un-blockers like uFlix can get around Netflix’s new DNS blocking but it cannot get around where payment originates – if you use an Australian credit/debit/savings card or PayPal the number gives away your location.

At present the backdoor payment option appears to still be working in Australia – Canada was the first cab off the rank due to its enormous ‘illegal’ use of the US Netflix catalogue.