What will Private Internet Access do after the repeal of net neutrality if ISPs start blocking VPNs

OpenVPN

 @sn0wmonster, I am really concerned about the state of the Internet after the FCC vote to repeal net neutrality in December.  I am curious about how PIA plans on handling the situation if ISPs decide to block the use of personal  VPNs altogether because with the repeal of net neutrality they would have the ability to do just that. I think it would be rather silly for us to assume that cannot happen when we all know that the United States Government only enacts privacy intrusive measures to please their corporate donors. @Max-P, I would also appreciate your input on this situation if you don’t mind.
 Thanks!

[Deleted User]

@OpenVPN Now why would we want to publicize to an adversary how we're going to circumvent them?

The issue with Net Neutrality is that it isn't what keeps the internet safe, secure or private. The alphabet soups and governments of the world will continue to break laws and breech the public trust for personal profit and power regardless of any "Net Neutrality" laws. The issue you should be talking about is how to better decentralize the internet at large, and that's not something PIA alone can do even if it wanted to.

I've long been looking into meshnets and i2p for some hope, but it might just take Net Neutrality falling to get us there (people tend to be reactionary rather than preventative).

Max-P

I really don't know what would happen, but I imagine we'd probably shift gear to more obfuscated and hidden tunnels to escape VPN bans. But to be realistic, I don't think it can get to this point because that would have too many side effects. VPNs are extremely popular and common in enterprise so people working out of office can attach their laptops to the office network at home. So if ISPs started slowing down or banning VPNs, there would be a fairly large outcry from enterprise IT including most likely companies that are already pretty close to some government representatives.

This is something that actually was a problem in China and they had to double-down on this, leaving loopholes in the process as a necessity. Turns out many Chinese companies needed to VPN to very large multinationals and that would have hurt the country way too much in financial loss. Same with GitHub when they tried to censor the censorship evasion software: I think it was blocked for a day or two but it also locked out a large chunk of developers that also depended on GitHub for either the company's code, or at minimum a whole lot of open-source libraries.


I have no doubt ISPs will try some shady things but ultimately I'm pretty sure most VPN services including us will find convenient loopholes and workarounds. One "easy" workaround that comes to mind would be domain fronting: if we have people enter via random Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Compute or Microsoft Azure nodes, the ISPs would have no way to know whether it's "premium" traffic or "VPN" traffic. Netflix's fast.com is another decent example of this trick: since they host the speed test on the same infrastructure that delivers video, ISPs are forced to not throttle Netflix otherwise it's clearly visible on the speed test, so they're stuck either admitting it or not throttling.

Still crossing fingers they will fail to undo net neutrality however. We have decent NN laws here in Canada and oh surprise I get 200 Mbps to practically every PIA server while the tickets from Comcast, Cox and Spectrum customers in the US just come in by the dozens...

tomeworm

@Max-P, on the whole your assessment is accurate, but only as one views the potentialities in the long term. In the short term there are bound to be bumps in the road. We your customers don't want to have to face even the possibility of being throttled or blocked outright by our ISPs for vpn usage. Some have already had to face it, even well before NN has been nixed and, as I'm sure you well know, getting an ISP to 'fess up to throttling any traffic of any kind is near impossible.

I'm troubled by the message you're sending -- a message that says, "PIA isn't proactive." I think a more prudent message would be, "We're planning for the worst and taking measures to prevent customer interruptions in service. If the worst doesn't happen then it's no skin off anyone's nose." The "more obfuscated and hidden tunnels to escape VPN bans" is exactly what PIA should have already been offering us long ago. Several other vpn providers have been doing so for years (e.g. OpenVPN over SSL, SSH, etc.). No reason why PIA, with its vast financial resources (in comparison to much smaller vpns who already offer said services), can't or shouldn't be doing the same.

@sn0wmonster

[Deleted User]

@tomeworm That pretty much is the future plan, I don't think even @Max-P was cued into it yet but I don't like making statements on things until they're official policy so ignore this comment.

tomeworm

@sn0wmonster, this is good news, and something I've been hoping to see for a long time. Hopefully sooner than later.

I'll officially ignore your unofficial statement  ;-)  (until it's official).