Your truck billboard is putting on a show for Netflix

The OpenMedia community crowdsources a mobile billboard to back up their open letter telling Netflix to stop blocking privacy-conscious Virtual Private Network (VPN) users.

It was a long road to get here (no pun intended), but your billboard truck finally took our community’s message straight to Netflix HQ in Silicon Valley.

The truck is a day into its two-day mission: to amplify our open letter to Netflix and make sure they hear you loud and clear. This means driving around Netflix' backyard promoting our campaign and building buzz.

We want Netflix to be fully on side with team Internet--this means asking them to stop blocking their customers who use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and security online. Anything less, and they're undermining a crucial pro-privacy technology when better, simpler ways of preventing user "content tourism" exist.

It wasn't easy: We’d planned on getting your message across with a giant billboard next to the main highway going into Silicon Valley. But after a bunch of work to make it happen, the advertising company backed out at the last minute, refusing to work with us on the campaign.

According to their approvals department, our billboard and our campaign constituted an "attack ad." I'd rather they at least called it what it was: a legitimate campaign petitioning one of the web's favourite companies to do the right thing. But in the end, I think their lack of backbone resulted in our gain, because it prompted us to go with a better option, which you can see below.

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Other billboard options were way beyond our budget or poorly located, so we scrambled to find an alternative that would have the same impact. Ultimately, thanks to your support, we were able to book a mobile billboard and put our message right in front of Netflix on their home turf for two days.

We couldn’t have regrouped and driven this over the finish line without your community contributions, so to those of you who chipped in, and to those of you who've spoken out, thank you!