In the last decade, the VPN market has been steadily growing, and this growth was spiked even further in 2020. Two main reasons contributed to an even more expansive use of VPN software: 1) Covid-19, quarantine, and work from home set the needs for home network security; 2) cybercrime has been on the rise and cybersecurity became a more common issue.

This has paved a broader way for commercial and business VPN service providers but also staged numerous challenges. One of them is to set security, transparency, and ethical practice standards for global commercial VPN service providers. At the front of this mission is i2Coalitions VPN Trust Initiative (VTI), that released their core principles on 29th September 2020. They decided to build the trust bottom-up, informing their users of crucial software intricacies, capabilities and limitations.

What is the i2Coalition VPN Trust Initiative?

i2Coalition formed in 2011 under very specific circumstances - USA was about to implement SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). Names of these two laws had little in common with their content - huge ambiguities existed within them, threatening online freedom of speech, user-created content, and copyright infringement looked more like Internet control.

i2Coalition founding members actively participated in the successful protests against SOPA and PIPA and having realized the need for ongoing efforts to protect online freedom formed a collective. Jumping eight years further, in 2019, they established a coalition with NordVPN, ExpressVPN, VyprVPN, Surfshark, and NetProtect to create VPN Trust Initiative or VTI. NordVPN being the founder of the initiative, you can read their statement here. Later they were joined by other IT companies, including web-infrastructure and website-security giant Cloudflare.

What does this mean to the VPN community?

According to official VTI principles for commercial VPN providers, it was

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