My point was that many of these VPNs are a commodity, routing to the same data center, with the same protocols. It’s mostly just branding that differentiates them, and…. Customer service. Which if it’s via Gmail, isn’t worth much.
Regarding your point. Yes in theory having more people go to the same data center increases anonymity. But at the expense of heavier scrutiny that’s easier to implement, and having the users banned because it’s a known VPN center. For example if you go to make a bitcointalk forum account from any VPN with M247, you’re in for some “evil tax” payments. And they are nice and let you pay, most don’t.
I'd say it's more than branding with mullvad. Their actual onboarding is made completely frictionless and unidentifiable. They could run all of the same branding and still have a email login and no one would disqualify them for it, yet they go out of their way to not collect emails and also have crypto payments as an option to bypass the payment rails.
The way I see it, fundamentally the differentiator between vpns is mainly trust that they won't compromise your data, and I haven't seen any that I believe more than mullvad though I am open to suggestions. It also helps that it just works flawlessly as well. I can set it to cycle between various US locations and it's genuinely a better experience than not having a VPN on even while switching servers all the time.
Oddbean new post about login | logout