[stickfigure]

Let me change the context and see if you still believe that argument: Countries like Russia and China don't need a global internet; they should just fix their censorship problems. VPN operators are scammers taking money from ordinary citizens.

[theamk]

Don't know anything about China, but many programmers have been leaving Russia for a last few years, and internet censorship is one of the big reasons for that. So it has the desired effect -- Russia has less talent, and thus its regime is less stable. It's tiny, but it's there.

As for "VPN being a scammer", this is all about trade-offs. If we had companies destroyed and robbed by VPN-powered ransomware, and we had plain people losing their life savings to VPNs, I'd argue for making VPN illegal. But it's not VPNs who are stealing people's money, it is cryptocurrencies.