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A Handful of Companies Own Multiple VPN Services

By Laura Tucker
A Handful of Companies Own Multiple VPN Services Featured Image

Don’t spend too long trying to decide which VPN service to go with. So many of them are owned by another larger service as part of a handful of companies that there’s a good chance you could be deciding between two or three VPN services, and they could very well be owned by the same company.

Also read: Can a Free VPN Be Trusted?

Conglomerate VPNs

We don’t need to debate the worthiness of VPNs at this point. We all know that they’re worthy of our time and money. They keep us safe when we’re browsing online and allow us to watch geographically-restrict content.

But while it seems like a booming industry, so many of these VPN services are owned under the umbrella.

For instance, AnchorFree owns seven other VPN services: Hotspot Shield, Betternet, TouchVPN, VPN in Touch, Hexatch, VPN 360, and JustVPN. While sometimes you can pick up one of these services and know right away it’s associated with Anchor Free, you won’t always know, as sometimes they bury that information.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with a larger company acquiring smaller companies, especially in the tech world. Look at Apple, Google, and AT&T. They buy out smaller companies just because they want their technology or their employees.

But this is larger companies buying out their smaller competitors, yet not merging them into the larger company. These smaller companies still exist.

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The senior E-threat analyst at Bitdefender, Liviu Arsene, believes this is a good thing for VPNs, as the more providers there are, “each with their own anonymization and security technologies, the less chances for an authority to tamper with that privacy by going after a single and large VPN provider.

“The VPN industry is all about having as many servers around the world as possible, in order to ensure both availability and coverage for their customers,” said Arsene.

[sc name=”expressvpn” ]

“Acquiring smaller VPN companies and allowing them to operate independently makes sense because their infrastructures need to be agile, flexible, dynamic, and constantly integrating new privacy-drive technologies in order to allow for more privacy for their clients.”

Hide.me weighed in on this topic as well, suggesting that this process allows the larger VPN conglomerates to better serve all segments of the market.

“It is more profitable to obtain users through the acquisition of smaller VPN providers than to obtain those users by suing standard marketing channels,” they explained. “Once they have that access, they are using a smaller brand for test runs of different business models without direct harm to the mainstream brand.”

Conclusion

So maybe it is like the other tech companies in some way. They’re bettering their brand and what they can offer, and perhaps these larger VPN conglomerates are doing just that, making their brand stronger while offering even more to their customers.

How do you feel about these VPN conglomerates? Do you think it’s beneficial to the consumer or no? Let us know how you feel about VPNs buying up the smaller VPNs in the comments section below.

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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