Netflix Hits Firewall in Indonesia

Apparently China isn’t the only major market left where Netflix will have to do some work to get off the ground. Indonesia’s dominant provider PT Telkom has apparently blocked access to the OTT provider’s video offerings as of Wednesday morning.

Why, you ask? Violence and pornography of course.  Well, it’s not PT Telkom itself behind the move, although they are the ones implementing it.  The Indonesian government had given Netflix a month to comply with local laws and such, but apparently someone decided not to wait that long.

Netflix didn’t actually ‘enter’ the country so much as it stopped halfheartedly preventing people from accessing its offerings via VPN despite copyright restrictions etc.  That move took them nearly everywhere all at once, but it wasn’t just copyright holders that had been happy with the previous state of affairs.

Netflix’s one size fits all approach to markets it hasn’t targeted directly seems likely to run afoul of other local laws and regulations elsewhere in the world, especially in Islamic nations.  China won’t be the only place that they will need to do some extra legwork and create a market-specific offering.

Meanwhile, Netflix has promised to crack down on VPN usage as a means to get past its own blocks. I’ll bet they don’t work too hard on that crackdown when it comes to China, Indonesia, and others that follow suit.

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