It's mind boggling that selling VPN services became a thing. Was I the NSA or any state level actor, selling a VPN service as a front seems the best thing to do to cast a pretty wide net.
Yeah but Netflix is better than most (possibly not better than the NSA but likely on a par with them) at determining which users are coming in via VPN.
I had a VPN buster bot on an IRC channel I was moderating because of some persistent troll who kept switching between every VPN that is out there.
Apart from using a deny list that you can find on Github, you just look at the size of the subnet the IP is coming from in WHOIS output. VPN IP adresses are part of very small subnets unlike legit ISP ip addresses that come from wide subnets
I don’t want my ISP (AT&T) fucking with my web traffic and inserting their own ads, throttling access to sites they don’t like (such as Netflix) because those sites compete with company-owned assets or partners that they would like to force everyone to use.
Yes, AT&T has been shown to be doing all these things.
Something to hide? How about something to protect. I'm overseas in a country that has a strong Chinese presence and a monopolistic semi-untrustworthy goverment owned ISP. I have a VPN profile installed on my wifi router so all my traffic is encrypted from my wifi WAN port all the way back to my home country and a trusted endpoint. If the VPN goes down, my router blocks all traffic until it's back up. Not all VPN users are dark web operators selling raw fentanyl or viewing Netflix from the "wrong" geographical area.
Which is why wide spread use is so important. Same for secure messaging. Same reason why free speech applies to and is protected for everyone and not just selected journalists.
Also recall that multiple ISPs have been caught tracking their users and selling their user’s data.
The expansion of secure connections limited that to a degree, but we know ISPs are still extracting and selling data based on their response to people switching over to encrypted DNS requests.