[HN Gopher] Kape Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, PIA, Zenmate, ...
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Kape Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, PIA, Zenmate, and VPN
"Review" Sites
Author : walterbell
Score : 129 points
Date : 2021-10-13 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (restoreprivacy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (restoreprivacy.com)
| ucha wrote:
| Yet Sven Taylor recommended ExpressVPN for years despite the fact
| that its ownership was quite suspect (secret). We've never fully
| known who was behind it and from where it was truly operated.
|
| The ranking of best VPNs on the site is mostly a ranking of VPNs
| that offer the largest referral fees [1].
|
| One of the largest, most honest and transparent VPN, Mullvad,
| does not have an affiliate program. And guess what, it's not even
| reviewed on Restore Privacy!
|
| [1] https://onemorecupof-coffee.com/best-vpn-affiliate-programs/
| fuddle wrote:
| Yes Mullvad is one of the best options!
| cliftonk wrote:
| Mullvad is wireguard based with extremely easy to use apps.
| Highly recommended.
| ouEight12 wrote:
| > The ranking of best VPNs on the site is mostly a ranking of
| VPNs that offer the largest referral fees [1].
|
| Can't we replace "VPNs" with pretty much any service at this
| point though?
|
| I haven't trusted 'review/ranking' sites in ages, because after
| see the same top 5 "best hosting providers ever!" lists one 3
| sites, you kind of get a hint.
| ohashi wrote:
| As someone who has been working on an honest web hosting
| review site for a decade now. You're totally right. I see the
| same pattern in this article talking about fake review sites.
| The biggest offender in hosting was Endurance International
| Group who owned so many major brands and gobbled them up.
| You'd often find any ranking full of the brands they owned
| (BlueHost, HostGator, iPage, JustHost, Site5, Arvixe, etc,
| etc, etc).
|
| Since you're really skeptical, I'd love to hear your take on
| what I've done (and been doing) in terms of trying to create
| an honest system.
|
| The gist is, I scrape Twitter data, filter out spam,
| affiliate links, etc, and use sentiment analysis to see which
| brands people actually like. My hypothesis was that reviews
| are fundamentally a weird human behavior. The real 'reviews'
| are embedded in normal conversation when you talk to people.
| With enough data of these signals, you can get a much better
| picture of what people really think. The results seem to line
| up basically like an NPS measurement.
|
| https://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare has all my data
| if you want to see how the rankings actually look. Not every
| company has an affiliate program. Many smaller companies
| aren't listed because I can't get enough data.
| ucha wrote:
| I don't know how accurate your ranking method is - NLP is
| tricky - but the idea is very very cool!
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Paid reviews seem easy enough to spot, they hype up the
| product/service too much, I'd read a VPN review, notice
| those canned phrases, and sigh because in my view the
| review site just scammed me of my time...
|
| Maybe a bot that collects reviews and detect similar
| sentences can also rate those bullshit "review sites"..
| truetraveller wrote:
| Mullvad it is! I'm potentially a new customer.
| consumer451 wrote:
| If I was in charge of intel ops for any country with a decent
| budget, first thing I would do is build or buy a VPN company.
|
| You have a self-selected group of people with something to hide.
| What could be more ideal to gather kompromat?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| most often though the thing they're hiding is watching movies
| and shows they couldn't get in their country otherwise.
|
| But the great thing about the vpn is some people leave it on
| and forget about it.
|
| So then you invest in a free porn service.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > most often though the thing they're hiding is watching
| movies and shows they couldn't get in their country
| otherwise.
|
| Sure, but the .0001% of users who use grindr while trying to
| hide their preferences, and hold a position of influence in
| government or a corporation make the whole effort worthwhile.
|
| As a bonus, the op is actually profitable because the
| 99.9999% of people you don't care about, and don't have to
| spend man-hours on, are actually paying for all the man-hours
| that you spend on the people of interest!
|
| The intel flywheel is up and spinning!
|
| edit: this is all conjecture.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Isn't this the outfit associated with the "Emperor of Korea" who
| took over Freenode?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Isn't this the outfit associated with the "Emperor of Korea"
| who took over Freenode?
|
| "Crown Prince"; the would-be Emporer who named him is still
| alive.
| chuckee wrote:
| Shouldn't some kind of anti-trust agency forbid such mergers, or
| break them up after the fact? At least in an alternate world
| where anti-trust law was still enforced.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Shouldn't some kind of anti-trust agency forbid such mergers,
| or break them up after the fact? At least in an alternate world
| where anti-trust law was still enforced.
|
| Even without anti-trust, it should be illegal to own or buy a
| "review site" for something you sell. That kind of thing is
| very counter to consumer interests and a blatant conflict of
| interest.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I frequently encounter 1-off review sites that are owned by
| the #1 product on the list. Many are transparent about it,
| and some even do a good job listing their competitors and
| describing them in a fair light. I think they are mostly a
| response to Google's algorithms prioritizing reciently
| published blog style top-10 lists.
|
| Here is the first result when I google "best free youtube
| downloader"
|
| https://www.gihosoft.com/hot-topics/best-free-youtube-
| downlo...
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I feel like this should fall under advertising laws. Maybe it
| does and I'm not familiar with the area. Does the review site
| need to disclose the fact of ownership?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I feel like this should fall under advertising laws.
| Maybe it does and I'm not familiar with the area. Does the
| review site need to disclose the fact of ownership?
|
| Even if they do, they can probably satisfy the requirement
| with disclosure where no one would actually notice it.
|
| The only kind of disclosure I'd be happy with is if at the
| top of the page and next to any self-endorsement they would
| have to show a garish warning banner with a legally
| mandated design that called out their conflict of interest
| in blunt terms. It would be easier and better to just ban
| the practice.
| SahAssar wrote:
| That sort of rule would quickly become very hard to untangle.
| For example news papers are often the only good source of
| reliable, in-depth book reviews and for historical reasons
| the companies that sell books and sell news papers are often
| owned by the same parent company.
|
| In the Kape case I think it is clearly dishonest, and the
| same can be said for the online order mattress space among
| others. Most online direct to consumer spaces (for example
| gaming and anti-virus) probably has some actor that is
| dishonestly setting up or buying review sites.
|
| But it is not exactly clear how you would in a legal sense
| draw the line.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > That sort of rule would quickly become very hard to
| untangle. For example news papers are often the only good
| source of reliable, in-depth book reviews and for
| historical reasons the companies that sell books and sell
| news papers are often owned by the same parent company....
|
| > But it is not exactly clear how you would in a legal
| sense draw the line.
|
| You could probably address that problem by permitting
| common ownership in cases where the company could prove to
| a court that it's implemented effective and rigorous
| firewalls, such that the reviews are independent and not
| affected by the common ownership and do not show evidence
| or tampering of bias. My understanding is those kinds of
| firewalls are de rigueur in the newspaper industry.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Sure, but it'd be extremely hard to prove if that bias
| has penetrated that firewall or if it hasn't. I think the
| reason it has (mostly) worked for journalistic
| institutions is that it is a profession that are taught a
| set of ethics as a part of their education and it has a
| history of adhering to those ethics.
|
| Proving a non-bias for what is your own actual financial
| interest seems almost impossible. I'm not saying it can't
| be done ever, but I would not want to have to argue
| either side of that.
|
| I said this in a comment below but I think it is relevant
| here too:
|
| Restricting speech is in general hard, what would be much
| easier is to require clear and obvious disclosure. Since
| journalistic ethics already requires that it should only
| require changes for dishonest actors.
|
| EDIT: To clarify: those firewalls are often in the
| journalistic institutions currently but it becomes a
| whole other ballgame when something needs to be proven in
| court. The suggestion to make them legally mandated is
| where I think we run into problems.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| Newspaper book reviews certainly can have the suggested
| problem.
|
| The Times would arrange for positive reviews of
| HarperCollins books by giving them to a reviewer who they
| knew would provide one.
| SahAssar wrote:
| It'd be interesting to see a source for that although I
| don't doubt that similar things have happened. I'm just
| saying that such a rule would not just untangle Kape, but
| would also unravel most larger media companies.
|
| Depending on how it would be written things like a
| youtuber reviewing a pixel phone or one TV show talking
| about a different TV show might be illegal.
|
| Restricting speech is in general hard, what would be much
| easier is to require clear and obvious disclosure. Since
| journalistic ethics already requires that it should only
| require changes for dishonest actors.
| donmcronald wrote:
| The story of Sleepopolis changed the way I think about review
| sites.
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-
| blogg...
| SahAssar wrote:
| Anti-trust is meant to protect competition against monopolies,
| not everything against anything evil. At least that's how I've
| understood it.
|
| It'd be hard to argue that Kape is even close to becoming a
| monopoly.
| nitrogen wrote:
| AIUI antitrust also covers cartels, e.g. this one from the
| early 20th century controlling lightbulbs:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
| SahAssar wrote:
| Isn't a cartel a type of threat to competition via
| monopoly? The wikipedia first-line definition of a cartel
| is "A cartel is a group of independent market participants
| who collude with each other in order to improve their
| profits and dominate the market". The monopoly in that case
| is by the group.
| nitrogen wrote:
| It seems like a cartel can form without having a
| collective monopoly. It's the collusion that's
| problematic, not the combined percentage.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Right. There are dozens of different VPN providers and
| switching costs are pretty low.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| I studied competition law and I think the regulators would
| probably struggle to even understand what a VPN is
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| They don't even have to though. All they have to know is that
| it's a market.
| mig39 wrote:
| I just signed up for 3 months of Mullvad a few weeks ago. So far
| so good. Didn't even need my name or anything. I paid
| anonymously.
|
| It's super fast with wireguard.
|
| No affiliate links, no special discounts, no special sales
| prices. No coupon codes. Just privacy.
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(page generated 2021-10-13 23:00 UTC)