How a virtual private network can crack the Internet wide open
In an Internet carved up by corporate and government interests, the notion of a truly unfettered online experience seems almost nostalgic. As founder and CEO of global virtual private network ( VPN) provider TorGuard, Benjamin van Pelt allows subscribers to blast through those barriers and put the “world” back into the World Wide Web.
“As a kid, I remember eagerly opening the latest floppy disks and CDs that would arrive in the mail to get me onto America Online,” he recalls. “The Internet really was the wild wild west back then. All you needed to reach any place on Earth was a modem and a phone line.”
Today, Internet users are corralled into pens defined by Internet service providers, corporate content creators and authoritarian governments.
“Your Internet service provider can even decide which websites you can or can’t visit,” says van Pelt. “TorGuard supports a free and uncensored Internet. If you want to experience anonymous access to the Internet as it was designed, a VPN is the tool you need to take control.”
Think of a VPN as a private tunnel that connects you to destinations across the Internet. Not only is your location unknown, but your activity while online is anonymous and associated only with one of TorGuard’s 3,500 servers in 55 coun- tries. TorGuard doesn’ t track its customers, so your activity can never be traced back to you.
What does the Internet look like through a VPN portal? There are no geo- fences, so Internet users will never see a message telling them that “this content is unavailable in your country.”
“With TorGuard, you can choose any of the 55 countries we serve from a dropdown menu,” says van Pelt. “With a single click, we generate an IP address — a numeric label associated with that country — so you’ll be able to access content as a citizen of that country, in- cluding media streaming services.”
Canadian subscribers are often eager to access the broader range of programming available on U. S. services like Netflix or Hulu. However, they’re more rigorously protected against garden variety VPNs. TorGuard provides customers with a stable IP address that can leapfrog VPN detectors.
“If I’m a Canadian subscriber to a U. S. streaming service, I can use a stable IP set to a U. S. location and the menu switches to programming seen by American audiences,” says van Pelt. “It’s not piracy, because you’re a paying customer. It’s not illegal to watch that content — it’s simply that the protections offered by corporate geo- fences aren’t very robust against the TorGuard service.”
While free VPNs promise broader Internet access, they’re also notorious for what they take from subscribers. That includes the installation of malware, personal tracking and, in some cases, selling users’ bandwidth to other customers.
Van Pelt notes that true Internet freedom is measured by much more than watching geotagged streaming content. In many coun- tries, it represents the ability to communicate freely and offers a crucial information pipeline to the outside world.
In China, for example, VPNs are targeted and disabled by the government and citizens are prevented from accessing both the TorGuard app and website.
“It would be easy to give up on markets like China and Russia,” says van Pelt. “But we continue to devote resources to developing stealth VPNs in those markets that are virtually impossible to censor. Even in those countries, we’re fighting for a free and open Internet.”