Daniel Berntsson, founder of Mullvad, gave a personal donation of 5 million SEK (roughly 450,000€) in 2025 to Örebropartiet. This enormous donation accounted for 72% of the party’s revenue in 2025.
How does this affect Mullvad’s legitimacy as a company advocating for a free and open internet, while also funding a political party whose agenda seem to contradict these values? The official party website (in Swedish) can be found via the link below.
Okay? So a hundred thousand users can drop the service. “You’re just a small drop in the bucket” is the same bullshit mentality used everywhere that has gotten the world into a lot of the problems it’s in now.
If everybody does their small part, it’s done pretty quick. If everyone sits around going “oh, there’s no ethical consumption” and accepted defeat, literally nothing changes.
Unions are built entirely on speed together strong.
Yes don’t make it the only battlefield but if you strongly disagree with the CEO, giving him more money is a problem. There’s no way around that.
Relevant watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYHvrd7Gwqg
I wrote that several orders of magnitude more than a hundred thousand users would have to drop the service to equal the amount of the donation under the logic that only a small percentage of the monthly payment of each user goes into the ceos pocket.
With that out of the way, the idea that I’m suggesting throwing your hands up and saying there’s nothing you can do is a wild extrapolation completely manufactured by you.
Successful boycotts are always accompanied by a program of political action that takes place outside the marketplace. Do not fight in the marketplace, you cannot win there. Boycotts are a form of recruitment that takes place in the marketplace because so much of our social interaction has been condensed to economics.
Boycotts in support of unions are always performed alongside a strike, work stoppage or other direct action, never by themselves. The intent is not to nickel and dime the absurdly wealthy company into compliance but to communicate support for the direct action in the marketplace that we all have to interact with to live.
But how does this impact what the op is about?
There is no direct action going on. There is no competing product (mullvad occupies a very unique position amongst VPNs. I’m not aware of any service that offers what they do with the security posture they have and the history of responding to power at the highest level that they have), and if you know of one I’m interested to hear about it. The boycotter would have to simply go without as opposed to turning to an equivalent competitor. To what end? Would that change the ceos political opinions, which are considered middle of the road in their fascist country of residence?
Declaring a battle on ground you cannot succeed upon to achieve nothing of importance only sacrifices the well being and willingness of those who would take action.
There are only so many good privacy options out there. So being choosy with services isn’t a luxury many can afford.