[drdaeman]

A VPN provider is no different than ISP.

Seriously. Both get paid and provide Internet connectivity. Both have incentives to do something to your traffic, would it have no negative consequences (financial, legal or just moral) for them.

The only non-technical difference is that VPNs have a lot of competition (so free market actually works) and in some countries/areas telcos have near-monopolistic positions.

That doesn't mean that VPNs are universal friends of your privacy and ISPs are its foes. Just that there is some disbalance.

[ehxcaet]

Yeah, I agree. I don't think there's an intrinsic good guy/bad guy. But I have pretty much zero faith in ISPs in Canada. Maybe it's better where you live.

[Godel_unicode]

Just because there are options doesn't mean there's competition n the free market sense. In order to have competition, the market requires complete information (or as complete as possible).

VPN providers are not competing on security as there is (as others have stated on this thread) no ability to validate their relative security claims. Many people are advocating for VPNs as a pure knee-jerk reaction to monitoring by traditional ISPs.