You handed over your credit card to a company that promised to protect your privacy. You believed in their mission. You felt good about being a customer. Then you found out the founder donated to a political party you despise. Suddenly, that subscription feels like a betrayal. Your stomach drops. You want to cancel. You want to burn the bridge.
I know that feeling. I felt it too. But here’s the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to tell you: Your moral stand against a VPN provider is already a moot point. The tool you’re boycotting is already broken.
Let me explain. The story starts with Mullvad, a Swedish VPN company that built its entire brand on radical transparency and privacy. They accept cash payments. They don’t log data. They openly discuss their ideals of a free and open society. Then a Reddit thread revealed that the CEO is the main financier of the Örebro Party, a local political movement with policies on immigration, secularism, and public spending. The internet erupted. Users demanded answers. Some swore they were leaving.
I get it. You don’t want your money funding something you hate. But here’s the twist that changes everything: The VPN itself is becoming functionally useless for most of the web.
Every major website now uses antibot systems. Cloudflare, Kasada, DataDome — they all flag commercial VPN IP ranges instantly. Try accessing a news site, a ticket platform, or even a social network while connected to a VPN. You’ll get captchas, blocks, or throttled pages. The privacy you paid for is evaporating in real time. A VPN might still hide your IP from your ISP, but its ability to actually access the internet anonymously is dying.
So the debate about whether to boycott Mullvad because of its CEO’s politics isn’t just a moral dilemma. It’s a distraction. We’re arguing over the political purity of a tool that’s slowly being rendered obsolete by the very systems it was designed to bypass.
Think about it. The original tension was: do you support a company whose values you disagree with, even if the product is excellent? That’s a valid question. But the real question we should be asking is: why are we pouring our emotional energy into a fight over a product that’s losing its reason to exist?
I’m not saying ignore politics. I’m saying pick your battles. If you’re going to boycott, boycott something that still works. But if you’re using a VPN to access blocked content or protect your anonymity online, you’re already fighting a losing battle. The antibot systems have already won. Your VPN IP is flagged, your connection is throttled, and your data is still being tracked — just not by the VPN itself.
This is the kind of uncomfortable truth that makes people angry. They want their moral stands to matter. They want to believe that switching to a different VPN provider will fix everything. But the technical reality is indifferent to our feelings. You can’t boycott your way out of a structural problem.
So what do we do? We stop pretending that VPNs are the solution. We start asking harder questions about the architecture of the web. We demand that privacy tools actually work in the world we live in, not the world we wish we had. And we accept that sometimes, the most powerful stand you can take is not to boycott a product — but to stop using it for the wrong reasons.
I’m done with Mullvad. But not because of the CEO’s politics. Because the VPN itself no longer delivers what it promised. And that’s a betrayal far deeper than any political donation.
FAQ
Q: Are you saying I shouldn't care about a company's politics?
A: No. You should care. But the problem is that the VPN itself is becoming obsolete. If you boycott Mullvad for political reasons, you might switch to another VPN that also has issues — and in the meantime, the antibot problem will still exist. Focus on the product's actual utility first.
Q: What's the practical implication for someone who uses a VPN daily?
A: You need to test whether your VPN actually works for the sites you visit. If you're constantly hitting captchas or blocks, the VPN is failing you. The rise of antibot systems means that commercial VPNs are no longer a reliable way to access the open web anonymously. You might need to explore residential proxies or other tools, but those come with their own trade-offs.
Q: Is there a contrarian take on this?
A: Some argue that the antibot problem is overstated — that VPNs still work for casual browsing and privacy from ISPs. But the truth is that large platforms like Google, Facebook, and even news sites aggressively flag known VPN IPs. The cat-and-mouse game is real, and the mice are losing. The contrarian view: maybe we should blame the platforms for using invasive antibot systems, not the VPNs for failing to keep up.