Getting Netflix to bypass IPv6 tunnel

Bright House Networks does not support IPv6, so I use the the Hurricane Electric IPv6 Tunnel Broker service to reach the IPv6 Internet. Last Wednesday night, Netflix started showing an error message when I tried to play movies: “You seem to be using an unblocker or proxy. Please turn off any of these services and try again.” Netflix customer support first said my access was blocked because my IPv6 address came from a different state. I switched to a tunnel in my own state, but Netflix still blocked me. It turned out that Netflix was doing a combination of two things that blocked my access:

• Netflix returns IPv6 addresses for a domain name even when only IPv4 addresses are requested. This caused my devices to attempt to connect over the IPv6 tunnel.
• Netflix blocks access from Hurricane Electric tunnels. This prevents movies from playing over IPv6.

I have requested that Netflix stop returning IPv6 addresses to DNS servers that only support IPv4. I also asked Bright House to support IPv6, but was told they plan to wait until they have no choice. While I waited for Netflix or Bright House to get their act together, I had to find a way to reach the IPv6 Internet without breaking Netflix. I only needed to reach the IPv6 Internet from one device, so I disabled IPv6 connection sharing on my router and followed the directions from Hurricane Electric to set up IPv6 tunneling directly on the device. This worked. I could both reach the IPv6 Internet and watch Netflix.