As a VPN user, you want to have a clear picture of which corporate entities have access to and are controlling your data, and who, if anyone, that data is shared with. In the VPN industry, consumer privacy is paramount, which means transparency is critical whenever one company acquires or merges with another. For starters, consolidation often impedes or outright kills healthy competition in a given industry, ultimately driving prices up for consumers while reducing the incentive for companies to innovate and improve their services for their customers. But it can also have undesirable effects on consumers. Industries tend to consolidate over time, and that process can sometimes bring smoother economies of scale (your Amazon Prime account now works at Whole Foods, for instance). Last year was a record year, and with new 2022 deals like Microsoft-Activision and Sony-Bungie, 2022 is already looking like a monster. To be clear, the pace of mergers and acquisitions in the business world at large - and the technology and media space in particular - has never been frothier. Pair that with the deliberately opaque and multinational ownership structure of many VPNs and it's becoming even trickier to make sense of which providers are owned or controlled by which parent companies. And those "big three" have gotten even larger in just the past few months, thanks to an increasing wave of VPN consolidation.
However, many of the biggest names in the industry today - and some of CNET's top VPN picks - are owned by just three parent companies. At first glance, you'll see at least a dozen options. Unlike mobile operating systems (two main options) or US mobile providers (three basic choices), you might be impressed with the range of VPN providers available to you. You're probably looking for some combination of better privacy (from snooping ISPs, advertisers or governments), increased online security (who knows who else is on that public Wi-Fi node?) or even more flexible video streaming options.
Let's say you're in the market for a VPN (virtual private network).