Daniel Berntsson, founder of Mullvad, gave a personal donation of 5 million SEK (roughly 450,000€) in 2025 to Örebropartiet. This enormous donation accounted for 72% of the party’s revenue in 2025.
How does this affect Mullvad’s legitimacy as a company advocating for a free and open internet, while also funding a political party whose agenda seem to contradict these values? The official party website (in Swedish) can be found via the link below.
“Voting with your wallet” in this circumstance, to the extent it has any effect at all, will only hurt you and other privacy conscious people.
No ethical consumption under capitalism, etc.
you don’t need a VPN company to use a VPN. and using the “no ethical consumption” line is pretty fucking gross when you’re talking about buying shit from nazis.
A vpn doesn’t need to be an internet proxy either, but users of vpn companies are paying them to privately and securely anonymize people’s traffic and shield their requests from the isp.
It is of course possible to do this using a vps over connections as well documented and simple as ssh but there are many ways to screw that up and paying a company to work out the details is extremely tempting.
If a person ends up using multiple endpoints, the cost of several vps subscriptions would also eclipse the cost of a vpn service.
I don’t need to pay someone to dig a hole for my pilings either but the quality and speed of their entrenching is beyond what I can create.
ok, but if there is two companies, one that donates to fascists and one that does not, are you gonna tell me you’ll just shrug your shoulders and go with the nazis because there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway? like, my dude, what the fuck?
Well out the gate: there isn’t a vpn provider like mullvad elsewhere. I have active subscriptions to several at the moment for different uses and have used at least two dozen different ones over the years as well as maintaining my own tunnels and overlay networks. There are probably lots of people that know more than me but I think they’d agree that mullvad occupies a specific niche that pretty much no one else is in right now.
What politics would a master need to have for you to submit to their will?
What level of need does a person have to be in for it to be acceptable that they buy bread from a Nazi owned store?