I think this is going to be a trend so I thought I would mention it on here because I know a lot of you use "VPN" services (which are actually proxy server services) to watch stuff outside of Canada.

Google has started blocking IPs if they get too many connections from a single IP, which is one way to foil high capacity proxy servers, I assume they're going to use this on youtube if they haven't already (you may have noticed there is now pay content on youtube, which is licensed). Basically it comes up with a CAPTCHA message and you keep having to put it in over and over again if the IP is high volume, which makes it unusable.

So if content providers start doing this generally then it will stop these high capacity proxy servers from working, unless they start using large numbers of IPs (which is tricky when you're streaming).

Personally I think it is a reason to stop using Google as it already driving a lot of people nuts but I can see a lot of the regionally-restricted websites like Hulu etc. using it shortly.

Are you sure this will be across all Google products like YouTube? I know Google Search already blocked lots of requests from single IPs because they didn't want other companies scraping their search results.

Well the proxy I'm using that has been blocked isn't anything to do with relaying searches, I'll try using youtube through it during peak hours and see if that falls over but it happens on Google Maps which isn't related to search (I guess). Google tells me they are blocking high volume IPs, but they won't say how many connections gets it blocked, it appears. Obviously, otherwise you could come up with a way around it.

Anyway, it seems an obvious way to block proxies, not a particularly new idea but if Google does it I can see other companies doing it.