Have you ever considered it would be easier for the government to pay the VPN providers a large sum to hand over the data, avoid a big public lawsuit, and silently mine all the data without having to break the encryption?
The ISP an the VPN providers are already mandated by law to hand over my data at any goverment request, but a VPN provider is not required to store data for 6-24 months. That is not what I'm afraid of.
I just trust my VPN provider more than my ISP. The data policy of my VPN is much better: they cannot legally sell my data,whereas my ISP make no such promises.
Don't get me wrong - I pay for a VPN subscription too for when I'm travelling/public wifi, but it's much easier to quietly hand VPN providers a nice sum of money for them to just hand over the keys. Everyone leaves happy.
Based on that, I believe if you want an extra level of security for every day use, then go for a big VPN co. If you're doing highly sensitive style stuff, then there's probably better software and services out there. It's all about your threat model I suppose.
