I agree that people should read the linked comments.
I did not find the the evidence to be as clear cut or damning as OP seems to think at all after reading through it.
Most claims are also put forward by a co founder of Private Internet Access. A direct competitor.
ProtonVPN is no competitor to Private Internet Access in terms of the size and the number of users. If you were a co-founder of PIA, would you risk your reputation by publicly providing false accusations against a company 1/100 of the size of yours?
That's the problem. I haven't found any of his statements, that would be only half-true. I even discovered a conference held in Lithuania in 2017, where one of the speakers was presented as the head of B2B sales at Tesonet, working on Oxylabs[1]. It is very unlikely, that ProtonMail was not aware of who it was partnering with on a free VPN service.
Furthermore, after it was pointed out by the co-founder of PIA, that the CEO of Tesonet is the director of ProtonVPN UAB, the company was renamed multiple times in two months[1], with its director now hidden from the public view.
Finally, the IP blocks, which belonged to Tesonet and were used by ProtonVPN just a few months ago – despite the co-founders of ProtonMail publicly denying any technical partnership between the two[1] – now belong to ProtonVPN[2].
> These stories were first fabricated by Private Internet Access, a competitor who has been feeling pressure from ProtonVPN lately.
This is a lie. Private Internet Access is probably the largest paid VPN provider in the world, and ProtonVPN (by Tesonet?) belongs to a short list of free VPN providers, such as Onavo VPN by Facebook[1] and Hola VPN by Luminati[2], most of which are subsidized by data mining companies. These are two completely different markets.
> We used the same legal address and nominee directors as our local partners because we still did not have our own office yet. For contractual reasons, these moves took some time. For example, ProtonLabs Skopje, our newest entity, only moved in November 2017.
ProtonVPN UAB has been founded in July 2016, and was still operated from Tesonet HQ in June 2018, when this fact was made public by the co-founder of PIA. The current ProtonVPN legal address in Vilnius, Lithuania can be used by any company, which agrees to pay for 1 work-place without any long-term obligations[3]. This means, that ProtonVPN might as well be still operating from Tesonet HQ.
> ProtonVPN/ProtonMail does not, and has never used any IPs or servers from Tesonet (this can be publicly verified)
This is a lie. ProtonMail admitted to using Tesonet IPs, when presented with Whois results in June 2018[4]. Those IP blocks were later assigned to ProtonVPN.
> Proton does not share any employees (or company directors) with Tesonet. This is also a verifiable fact.
This is a lie. It is no longer possible to verify, who is the director of ProtonVPN, because the company made the public record unavailable after changing its name multiple times in the last two months[5]. The last public record listed the CEO of Tesonet as the director of ProtonVPN[6], which was still true in early June 2018, when the co-founder of PIA made the fact public.
> There is little actual evidence that Tesonet does data-mining (in any case we have never used infrastructure from them).
This is a lie. There is plenty of actual evidence, that Tesonet is running a data mining company, called Oxylabs[7][8], which sells access to "10+ Million Mobile IPs in Every Country and Every City in the World".
