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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about this for a while but I might have to actually do it now. Start a business, and get a server hosted in colo under the business name. Then get a permanent openvpn connection between your home router and the colo'd server.

Now your "ISP" is the colo provider, not your home ISP, who only gets to see an encrypted pipe, and everything you do is under a business name.

Seems like the best way forward to me.

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> home ISP, who only gets to see an encrypted pipe

Until your home ISP that doesn't care about net neutrality just decides to throttle your OpenVPN encrypted pipe and make it useless, they don't need to see what is inside of the encrypted pipe to fingerprint it as a VPN tunnel.

VPNs are so ubiquitous in business that a move like this would seem like corporate suicide.

Totally, but they could just spin it to the consumer like TV cable packages. "Get our Internet 'Social Media Plus' plan for $100 / month, featuring blazing fast speed to our premium partners Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit! Use a corporate VPN from home? For an extra $10/month add on our VPN Pro PLUS package to get ultra fast connection back to your office!

terms and conditions apply, all other internet traffic is at speeds of up to 1mb/s"

It is far fetched sure, but I honestly wouldn't put it past some ISPs to attempt something super lame like this.

It is not far fetched.

$10/month? Historically, business prices were much higher. The customer is not footing the bill, remember?

"Oh, you wanted a business connection."

I've been thinking about the same thing. There are actually a lot of benefits to routing all of your traffic through a VPN to a gateway you control. You can work around your last-mile ISP snooping, censoring, or manipulating your traffic. You can obfuscate your meatspace location. You can get as many static or dynamic IPv4 and IPv6 addresses as you want. You can transition between landline and cellular connections without changing IP address(es) or breaking your open connections. You can bond together multiple connections. The only problem is actually getting IP addresses that haven't already been blacklisted by half of the internet for spam/fraud.

I think the killer app would be to combine this with a mesh networking protocol like CJDNS and some kind of cryptocurrency based micropayments for bandwidth. We could build the data equivalent of a microgrid, a p2p internet operating in parallel with but connected to the hierarchical one.

Until ISPs decide that more than a certain quota of opaque encrypted traffic is a premium, business, non-consumer use-case for which a sizable extra fee is levied.

Without the protection of all lawful uses in the Open Internet Order, any technical hack around non-neutral ISP policies is itself fairly trivial subject to being blocked or surcharged by ISPs.

Sounds like an awfully expensive solution. If you're going to spend that much why not just pay extra for a business level service while "Doing Business As" yourself? That way you don't need to worry about some server in a colo and filing paperwork for a business.

Works great, until your ISP bans your encrypted pipe.

But how to get an IP that is not banned with so many services? Usually the providers IPs have been abused so much that you're blacklisted.

So... $50 per month cost on top of my current home internet connection?

Privatetunnel [1] provides unlimited bandwidth for $29 per year.

[1] https://www.privatetunnel.com/home/pricing/

There are better choices, privacy-wise. https://thatoneprivacysite.net

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