Enough. You do this on every mention of PIA and you have been told to stop or get banned [0]. I don't know why you are on this crusade when there is not even the slightest hint of wrongdoing [1] so please, easy on the conspiracy theories.
It's not about conspiracy theories, but about concentration of power.
If control of PIA — for whatever reason, and be it that Andrew Lee dies and his heirs sell it, or that he can't finance it anymore, or that a three-letter agency forces him to — ends up in the wrong hands, then also all of Freenode and Snoonet end up under control of that entity.
It's not that I don't trust PIA, but that I fear that PIA itself may end up in the wrong hands.
And I'm not on a crusade against PIA — I won't complain about their donations without requirement to advertise in return to projects such as KDE, with a transparent funding process.
But I am on a crusade against centralizing any services, be it killing XMPP federation (thanks, Google), be it pushing a "secure" Messenger that is bound to a single social graph and server infrastructure controlled by one group in the US (thanks, Moxie), or be it a single compsny gaining significant control over several major IRC networks, clients, libraries, and over Matrix at the same time.
To be honest, my only problem with them is their customer service. And their phone app. My connection is half speed on my phone. :( They also have some strange problems with the linux app (which I wish they would open source). Otherwise I'm really happy with them.
I actually haven't. I will try later and report back. But I have a 60/30 connection (down/up) and am getting 26/5, after messing with settings (which strangely is using TCP instead of UDP). And yes, this is under 5G, and I've tried multiple servers.
As for the Linux side, their app just needed some better instructions on their site, and then works fine. So I'm not really upset on that, just had to argue with tech support for awhile to get transferred to somebody that knew what I was talking about.
Yes, and interestingly, the Freenode staff had previously disabled Tor access to the Freenode network for over a year or so because of "attacks" which they claimed they could not handle. This was a pretty flimsy excuse once I finally found someone that knew the technical details, and though I chased the "right" people down several times to ask why Tor access had not been enabled, I never got a good answer. Cue PIA taking over Freenode, and within a couple of weeks, Tor access to Freenode was once more enabled. I've been a happy PIA customer for some years now, but that left such a huge and positive impression on me. I'm not completely sure the two things are simply correlated, but after talking to all those Freenode staffers over the years about it, I can't imagine it wasn't pushed by PIA.
I was actually primarily talking about their donation to the Krita Foundation [1], but yeah, it's good to be aware of the above, even if thus far I haven't seen anything nefarious from them.
Freenode and Snoonet, two major IRC networks, are now owned by them.