Yeah, please could everyone not pile in and start re-hashing the extensive comments that have already been made only a week and a half ago.

Whatever you're thinking of posting has almost certainly already been said more than once on the original HN discussion.

> A handful of VPN providers become a one stop shop to get the data of what used to be hundreds or thousands of ISP's all over the world in many jurisdictions just as a few big DNS over HTTPS providers become a one stop shop to get the DNS of what used to be hundreds or thousands of ISP's all over the world.

This is backward.

How many ISPs do you have to choose from? Only a couple because there is limited and local infrastructure. How many have business entities in your country? All of them, because it’s a physical location based business.

How many VPN providers (not counting resellers) do you have to choose from? How many are not located in your country?

Most people aren’t using VPNs to commit crimes so significant that they need to be intercepted and unmasked by global law enforcement. Most just want privacy, but if crimes are committed it’s usually piracy or something similar. If we were seeing situations like you’re thinking where police are piercing through VPNs, we’d be seeing evidence of it. Parallel construction theories aren’t going to cover everything for all of time.

You’re also underestimating the difficulty of coordinating criminal investigations across countries. It’s really hard to arrange this and legally expensive. If VPN providers were getting constant requests from countries everywhere to intercept traffic it wouldn’t be a secret. We’d be hearing stories from VPN companies advertising it loudly as one of their selling points for being located in a country which doesn’t require international cooperation.

Governments would also be making moves to block payments or connections to VPNs in those exempt countries, diverting people to their compromised VPNs.

It’s not 4D chess. Connecting to a VPN in another country isn’t completely unbreakable legally, but the reason governments are going after it is because it makes it so much harder or impossible to unmask that it interferes with goals of being able to unmask internet users doing things they don’t want.

Most of the big VPN companies known from advertisments all over the internet are probably honeypots of the usual countries.

Interesting theory. My own theory is that the big corporations want to siphon off more data from people. That is, I think, the main agenda. See android recently stating that everyone has to give up their age. Next step will be ID (though probably, in order to verify the age, one has to give up the ID anyway, so age sniffing could be called ID sniffing).

In fact this makes it more likely. Now that a court has ruled that current copyright law does not make a VPN provider liable, the European Council (all heads of state of European countries) will propose a law that makes VPN providers liable for copyright-infringing traffic

Yeah.

In particular for "hot" topics like this people should use the search function at the bottom of every HN page before rushing into post.

The last thing everyone needs is yet another duplicate post with hundreds of comments re-hashing the exact same comments that people already made before. It is not helpful for anyone.

The writer is a relatively prominent UK developer; he certainly hasn't missed that the UK isn't in the EU.

You're likely referring to the line "Hopefully this draws a simple line in the sand for the UK government, ..."; the strictest interpretation of the metaphor is certainly muddled, but it is common in the UK to look to EU rulings and policy discussions for comparison to our own - politicians will be aware of them and will use them to help decide whether or not to test things in our own courts.

Probably should have put a `>` before the first paragraph, because it reads like an 8/8 bait and most people won't continue to the next one.

Regarding the misleading podcast claims, at least all the podcast and youtube ads made the VPNs popular on the mass market so now they are more difficult to be silently outlawed.

I think an issue VPNs face is that while your first paragraph is not objectively true, it ends up being truer than I might like because the other use cases are not well covered. If you've got one of the things the HN gestalt would call a non-sketchy use case, you've also got the problem that it's rather hard to verify that any VPN you are using actually fulfills your goals. They can say they do, but you have a very hard time proving it.

On my current fiber provider, I'm already behind a very large CGNAT install. To a large degree, de facto that's already a lot of the "non-sketchy" use cases for VPN covered for me. IP addresses are already one of the weaker signals for tracking people as it is. Mobile networks have been letting you shift IPs for years just by how they work. Other internet providers that don't slap thousands of people at a crack behind one IPv4 with CGNAT didn't necessarily guarantee stable IP addresses, hence the need for dynamic DNS for decades.

The hole VPNs plug is necessary, but not even remotely sufficient if you are trying to actually protect yourself from some attack. Slapping a default Windows 11 install on a VPN to a first approximation protects you from nothing.

And since the "non-sketchy" uses are rather dubious, that really does sort of leave just the sketchy ones. I don't think it's a coincidence that when they pay a YouTuber to advertise them, the YouTuber generally ends up talking vaguely about the protections but fairly concretely about the sketchy uses, with screen shots showing them using Netflix in a different country. The companies know what they're getting used for and what they can provide.

VPN is what a smart person uses when they are at an internet cafe or somewhere else with public internet where you can’t trust that the traffic isn’t sniffed by someone for giggles and your bank credentials are going to leak.

Logging into my work computer, to work in the company network: yeah very sketchy.

Many people reading this are going to stop at the first sentence without realizing you're paraphrasing a position you apparently don't agree with.

Meta: your first paragraph could really use a quotation indicator / mark. I suspect it was intentional: the ragebait was very effective on me before reading the rest of your comment (I was ready for defend my usage of tailscale to access my iot stuff).

I use a VPN to have access to my HomeAssistant instance at home, where I can control every aspect of the house. Without this, I would have to pay for a domain name, manage the certificates, and exposing myself to external attacks. So, for me, a VPN reduces massively the attack surface.

There is this law, where if you don't see the purpose of something, is probably because you never needed it. Which is fine, but don't gatekeep others wanting to use them.

Edit: OP forgot to format text, so my anger should be directed to however said the quote...

This is going to get some interesting responses by people commenting immediately after only reading the first paragraph.

>I have actually heard otherwise intelligent people say things just like that, including site operators who run nontrivial websites

This is an illusion we really need to remove from our collective consciousness. Running a popular website while being an ops genius, being a neurosurgeon who saves lives every day or being the world's best architect doesn't mean someone has sound opinions on topics right outside their area of expertise.

In fact, nowadays it seems to be all about appeals to authority which IMHO makes us more ignorant because many people seem to not think critically anymore. Instead, it's just "an expert said so" - then you look into the "expert" and in many cases they either aren't actually an expert or they're a paid shill. But that's a topic for some other day.

I want to applaud your choice to not include anything like quotes here. That would be misleading because it isn’t an actual literal quote. And, we’re too used to just skimming posts here before jumping right in to argue against them.

> Allowing these tools let's underage people access porn

You can't imagine how much crime I committed in my teenage years. You don't wanna end up like me, punks! Stay off that crap!

I wanted to respond with something of substance (I still don't understand if it was a paraphrase or not) but every reply here is a meta reply, so hello to all fellow meta reply guys.

Region locking content is the undesirable behavior. Accessing it is very desirable.

I'm genuinely considering whether the people replying to you are bots now.

Maybe put some quotes around that first paragraph. Seems like some people downvote you before they get to the part where you reveal you don't think that way

TIL every corp in the world are sketchy people for using VPN.

This is the must absurd take possible. Most business use VPNs for their day to day operations.

yes, assuming your laws are like "Only blue eyed males are allowed to have internet"

This is the dumbest thing I've read in a while

How do you think you can work from home with a VPN for access of the companies network?

Edit: missed the second paragraph

> I have actually heard otherwise intelligent people say things just like that, including site operators who run nontrivial websites.

First of all: thank you for using the word say, rather than think or believe or anything of that ilk. Too many of these discussions reduce to attributing or misattributing motivations to people.

That said, I still have issues with that statement. Let's assume that you are talking about an intelligent person who works in tech. Chances are something was taken out of context because they probably know what VPNs are for and that they have legitimate uses. Sometimes they miss context because they are not expressing their ideas clearly. Sometimes we miss context because we hear something we violently oppose to, and ignore the rest.

Another issue is that categorizing and vilifying people genuinely doesn't help the cause. At best, people will ignore the counter points. At worse, it will push people further away. We have to listen and educate based upon issues that are relevant to the audience.

Simplistic responses like, "freedom of speech" won't solve anything because those words have lost meaning. Too many people scream "freedom of speech" to excuse what they are saying, while they are active in suppressing the freedom of speech of others. Too many people use the freedom of speech as a tool to intimidate others, to restrict the speech or legal actions of others, because they are more interested in imposing their values on others rather than challenging the values of others. We should be illustrating ways that freedom of speech are relevant using examples that are relevant to the people we are speaking to. In the case of framing freedom of speech for people who are concerned with abortion: pro-life people may respond better to presenting freedom of speech as a safe stage to promote the sacredness of life, while pro-choice people may respond better to framing the freedom of speech as a safe way to seek out information relating to getting an abortion.

Likewise, people can see through simplistic attacks like accusing others of using children for leverage in an argument. Most of the people who say "think of the children" are trying to dismiss people who are trying, legitimately, to protect a vulnerable class. There are plenty of good reasons why the policy mechanisms to protect a vulnerable class may be objectionable, yet framing one's opposition with a reductionist interpretation of intent pushes people apart when they ought to be seeking out better solutions. For example: two people may agree that underage access to porn has to be dealt with, but disagree on the role that VPNs play in circumventing restrictions. So talk about how VPNs are not an age-based access control mechanism. Talk about the misclassification of information about gender and sexuality as pornography, assuming it is relevant to who you are talking to. Talk about the other benefits that VPNs offer in maintaining a free society. In other words, get them on your side and start seeking out better solutions.

flagged for intentional ragebait, if this wasn't ragebait you would have used quotes

Why do online services need to know where I am? Why does my ISP need to know who I'm communicating with? For me, VPNs are about reducing privacy leakage. Most of the internet collects, aggregates, and sells knowledge about their users, and VPNs are an important tool for withholding that.

It is a sort of LAN network over the Internet. That way, you can connect to devices as if you were in the local network, but having them exposed to the internet.

Traffic is encrypted so there is noone knowing what you are sending, they can still trace that is coming to/from a specific node.

https://femboy.beauty/P1iUdl

You must be blessed to live in a country that has no website blocks.

Primary use I have for it is hosting internal services that I don't want on the public internet - do the same at work, it reduces the attack surface hugely

Bypassing censorship is the biggest one. No, they don't work on Netflix. But they work on many things.

Privacy from ISP

Bypass censorship

Get treated the same by websites when traveling

Avoid bad laws

Gain good laws

Is that really a question that needs to be asked in 2026?

My ISP Comcast (rebranded to Xfinity to avoid all the negative associations with it's actual name) does man in the middle attacks on HTTP connections and injects javascript code into webpages. I actually had this happen to the steam browser back in ~2013 and I had to restart it. But they still do it today in 2026. I don't use a commercial VPN because I host from home. But I do tunnel my HTTP browsing to a remote VPS I rent.

I just loaded up Bluesky this morning to discover it demanding proof of my age bc I live in Texas. First thing I did was turn on my out-of-state vpn and try again. not today, satan!

To bypass geo-locked content and age restrictions of course. What else???

Yeah. And Jess Phillips was calling for that and much more draconian measures (e.g. on device scanning).

Why is something like ublock origin not enough for your needs? Is it more about the principle of not wanting to share any fingerprint across the Internet, or some specific tracking concern?

How are you not blocked by banking, shopping, even sometimes google search?

You can do a lot. Cloudflare doesn't want to ban all VPNs, not yet.

Can't do much without a VPN, it's scary out there.

Jup, if you are using any mainstream VPN provider (the ones shilled on every tech YouTube channel) or anything that results in a datacenter IP, it is trivial to discover and block.

The detection tech has been around forever: https://focsec.com/

Are you implying the EU court is (secretly) cooperating with national legislative bodies to implement surveillance tools while pretending to uphold civil liberties?