I suspect willful blindness to infringement wouldn't help. Willful blindness is such a problem in law that most laws are phrased using the words "known or should have known". Someone who should have known is said to have constructive knowledge.
There's also business and legal reasons why ISPs need to log and inspect traffic. "No logging" means "no abuse desk" - i.e. if someone's using your ISP to send out spam or hack people, and you aren't logging or inspecting traffic, then you can't investigate that spam or that hacking. At a minimum it means every other online service is going to distrust your users - i.e send them through reCAPTCHA hell; up to an outright ban. Think like what it's like to use clearweb services through a Tor exit node, and now imagine that for a bunch of nontechnical users. They're going to switch to the ISP that doesn't result in them getting group punishment. But actual criminal actors are going to flock to the service, because they need someone in the middle to launder their packets for them, which makes them have a worse reputation, and so on.
VPN providers, especially non-logging ones, keep their abuse handling practices secret. They all claim to have "ways" to catch abuse on their network - I suspect it just comes down to a combination of flagging accounts/logging events following certain types of behavior along with data collected from abuse complaints.
Seems possible enough to keep logs of possible abuse for an account without keeping IP logs around. I'd also guess they have a lower standard for evidence needed to suspend/close an account for abuse than an ISP would. It's just not worth the trouble to keep a suspicious account open when it risks getting their IPs blacklisted.
VPN companies already do sketchy shit to get around Netflix's georestrictions[0]. I've heard rumors like they route traffic through residential IP blocks somehow. If they're able to do this, then IP reputation doesn't matter as much. They're already burning IP addresses to connect to Netflix with anyway...
[0] BTW, how is this not a massive industry-wide DMCA 1201 lawsuit? Advertising a service as being capable of getting around georestrictions sounds like it should be as illegal as advertising a DVD decryptor.
IP reputation matters, but users only care when it stops them from doing what they want. Residential connections often have certain ports blocked and some uses restricted by the ISP which makes resi connections less ideal for some types of abuse, but great for things like using streaming services. An IP that doesn't work for some services may still work great for others. It seems like a lot of people using VPNs know to try a few different servers/connections until they get the kind of access they want.
> how is this not a massive industry-wide DMCA 1201 lawsuit?
Is it illegal to bypass geoblocking in the US? I'd think that in the US using a VPN to get around geoblocking could count as 'circumventing a technological measure that controls access to a work' or whatever and could be considered illegal under the DMCA, but perhaps there's also a difference between using a VPN to access content offered outside of your own country you were never authorized to view vs using it to access the same content you'd normally have access to if you weren't just on vacation? I don't think I've heard about any lawsuits against VPNs for that.
Either way, I'd agree that advertising a service as a means to bypass geoblocking is probably a bad idea. As long as they don't outright tell people they should use the service to do that though I think an argument could be made that a VPN just provides internet access, and the VPN's ToS/AUP requires users to not to do anything illegal with the connection, and so the user is responsible for what they do with it.
how would it be a lawsuit? its farcical that there even are georestrictions in the first place. Netflix doesnt care about them either. The only reason they exist is to please rights holders with weird demands. It's not either netflix or the customer's responsibility to care about upholding them (other than netflix's own contractual requirements)
In other news; netflix themselves allow the usage of VPNs[0] provided you dont use the free (ad-supported) plan. Presumably to prevent the sort of thing I used to do with spotify years ago (be from a region where no advertisers paid them, so the space where adverts would usually be was just blank)
There's also business and legal reasons why ISPs need to log and inspect traffic. "No logging" means "no abuse desk" - i.e. if someone's using your ISP to send out spam or hack people, and you aren't logging or inspecting traffic, then you can't investigate that spam or that hacking. At a minimum it means every other online service is going to distrust your users - i.e send them through reCAPTCHA hell; up to an outright ban. Think like what it's like to use clearweb services through a Tor exit node, and now imagine that for a bunch of nontechnical users. They're going to switch to the ISP that doesn't result in them getting group punishment. But actual criminal actors are going to flock to the service, because they need someone in the middle to launder their packets for them, which makes them have a worse reputation, and so on.