Just for a moment close your eyes and imagine a world where you have to fill-in a mildly complicated form before you visit a website (or blindly sign away whatever rights you might have had).
A world where every second funny video you might have found on Reddit leaves you with a cryptic message that some "rights holder" doesn't permit you to see it (and denies you from joining the fun everyone else seems to be having in the thread).
A world where you cannot buy half of the cool stuff you want (and everyone else seems to be having) because you cannot even see the online store where it is sold.
A world where you're even denied access to old and seemingly public domain e-books.
Open your eyes. This is the world most of us live in.
We're not on commercial VPNs because we love to, but because often there is no other way. They are in a sense invaluable when it comes to geo-restrictions, even though I agree with you that they are worthless for many of the reasons they claim to exist.
Ok. Use a proxy, or set up your own Proxy/VPN on a VPS? Then you also have a VPS - you can host your own website there, use it to download stuff and rsync it back to your local machine, deploy nextcloud, etc., all for less than the cost of ExpressVPN. And bonus points, you can use unlimited devices.
Less of the cost sure but you are saving a couple bucks a month tops and replacing that with work on setup and maintenance instead. Moreover that way you get a single IP rather than the 40 different countries with multiple IPs my provider gives me.
Set up your own Proxy/VPN on a VPS, is bad for fingerprint perspective. You get static IP in rare IP range for consumers. Pirating is also meaningless unless you use special hosting provider.
A world where every second funny video you might have found on Reddit leaves you with a cryptic message that some "rights holder" doesn't permit you to see it (and denies you from joining the fun everyone else seems to be having in the thread).
A world where you cannot buy half of the cool stuff you want (and everyone else seems to be having) because you cannot even see the online store where it is sold.
A world where you're even denied access to old and seemingly public domain e-books.
Open your eyes. This is the world most of us live in.
We're not on commercial VPNs because we love to, but because often there is no other way. They are in a sense invaluable when it comes to geo-restrictions, even though I agree with you that they are worthless for many of the reasons they claim to exist.