OTTAWA — Virtual private network service NordVPN warned on Friday it could pull out of Canada over the federal government’s proposed lawful access bill. NordVPN said in a social media post it is reviewing the bill and would consider leaving Canada if the bill requires it to compromise its privacy protections. The company said if […]
Quickly running out of places where VPN companies can be legally incorporated/based and where exit servers can be located that aren’t subject to advancing laws like these.
All the fools who were saying “lol they can’t ban VPNs, impossible!!!” are looking well ever more foolish and will feel very confused and shocked when the pain actually hits them and they realize it’s not so easy and they were wrong and complacent and too late now to do anything. But these are primarily westerners who’ve never had the western sanctions regime and its full power turned against anything they care about so they can be forgiven a bit for not understanding how powerful it is, its total dominance of financial exchange and how lacking a counter state interest by Russia or China in spinning up their own censorship resistant VPN for western users there isn’t really much counter to it. Russia and China are going to sit and laugh at you flailing about in the tattered remains of your liberal illusions of freedom and not lift a finger to help.
Sure you can pay for a VPS and spin up a VPN on that but that has your credit card on it with your name making it clear its you doing it and providing zero plausible deniability and as a non-residential IP you’re going to be getting increasing amounts of blocks by anti-AI-scraper methods as well as fraud alerts. Also it doesn’t hide you in the crowd so even advertisers who don’t have access to your credit card like authorities would will be able to associate all your activity back to one person and it’s just a short correlation from there via a mistake back to your real identity. Also won’t help much with torrenting copyright content as your provider will drop you at the first sign of trouble. Maybe you can find one that shrugs off DMCAs but I bet you’ll be paying through the nose. No more $5/month long term plan, get ready for $25/month and much higher than that and you still won’t necessarily be able to avoid ISP throttling of your traffic if they move to allow-listing for uncapped speeds only to known services and throttle everything else.
Very grim.
Iceland, Zealand, Sweden
Major countries, sure. But there are plenty of countries out there that thrive on weird little niche industries that would love to make some dough being VPN exit points.
The nation of Tuvalu gets 15% of its GDP from .tv domain registration fees.