That's really all they're buying, right? The advertising budget, the name recognition, and the existing user contracts are the important things.
The software isn't anything special, and the hardware and network connections to actually run the VPN are probably a very small part of their margins - certainly not worth nearly 1 billion dollars.
Actually, it was one of the few VPNs that regularly worked to connect past the firewall in more rural China (outside Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen). Don't personally know (or have as much interest) about the state of things now.
Pure speculation, but I would guess that it may make practical sense for the party to relax the firewall in places where access to internet resources abroad could be more necessary for economic reasons.
The much heavier traffic and variety of traffic in urban areas probably means looser rules. Even if just to reduce the noise for the great firewall admins.
It’s not about heavier traffic. China literally has different rules for different parts of the country, different ISPs, different wireless providers (especially foreign versus domestic), etc.
Just the sort of thing you see in the real world. It's much easier to lock down access for a network with less people using it.
A network with more people starts to find all the edge cases where your lock-down rules break legitimate things, which results in calls to your boss from people with the clout to make you change stuff.
Similar for reporting, alerting, etc. Volume and variety of traffic can force you to be more lenient in larger networks. Or lose any real effectiveness because your signal/noise ratio is now bad.
I don't remember the specifics, but there were a lot of different packet types (eg UDP not just TCP) and protocols that ExpressVPN used to negotiate and transfer data. I'm sure there was quite a bit of cat-mouse, but I also assumed that there might be a symbiotic (or more) connection between Chinese security and ExpressVPN. I just wanted things to work, and didn't care so much about the actual "privacy" of the tunnel.
these are valid questions to ask but I'd be wary of falling into this very common trap that I see on HN, which is dismissing the sophistication of a product based on, well, nothing really. Given that another company was willing to pay $1b, and given that this is a free market, do you think it's more likely that ExpressVPN was simple and "not special", or that there is actually some substance there?
Let's presume you are correct; is they idea that they are then special in a way that PIA isn't? This is just like when your local supermarket gets purchased by a company that owns other nearby supermarkets to be folded into their brand: they want the location and the customers that visit it, not some interesting innovation they heard you have been hiding for how to run your supply chain.
It’s a bit like saying “but getting to the moon is just a bit of metal and fuel”.
Execution is everything. And there are no guarantees when it comes to execution. That’s what the cost of acquiring an otherwise “simple” business is: the cost to guarantee successful execution of a business/product plan.
You're suggesting that either ExpressVPN was a really good business with sophisticated secret sauce, strong technical chops, and capital assets probably worth $1B (validated by people with lots of money being willing to pay for it), or that I and other HN commenters are wrong about the sophistication and it's really worth peanuts because OpenVPN can be run on most routers or any Linux box.
The latter is obviously false, but the former is not necessarily true - instead, what I and other users are pointing out is that they're really selling is their users, and implying that the buyer expects to be able to extract more than $1,000,000,000.00 of value from them. As you pointed out, you see this sort of comment when a social network or many other kinds of startups with lots of users are sold.
The point is that the users are the product in this transaction.
