The revision makes a little more technical sense, but only a little. No one needs a VPN "provider": if you have cooperating endpoints, there's no need for a service provider at all. My personal devices and computers are connected by a VPN with no one in the middle. The same is true of all the devices used by everyone at SFLC, including the devices we use for voice communications. So what you say about VPNs, like most of what you said in the first draft about "six strikes," is more misleading than leading.

We're still short a reasonable account of the political economy. Your "Joe Consumer" isn't consuming just anything: for six strikes to be relevant, he is consuming material that infringes the copyrights of oligopolists who want him to stop. The ISPs are people who want Joe Consumer to burn as many bits as possible, provided that his doing so doesn't cost them burdensome enforcement efforts on behalf of other people, that will reduce their profits on the bits Joe Consumer "consumes." The "six strikes" nonsense is a way of continuing to help Joe Consumer burn as many bits as possible while pretending to improve the oligopolists' control over "content" while maintaining maximum profitability. If you explain how to exploit those divisions in order to assist "Joe Consumer" to do something more important than watch movies without paying for them, you would be doing the reader a significant service.

FreedomBox is free software. Its price is zero. It runs on small cheap hardware that costs, now, if you pick, say, Rasberry Pi, in the neighborhood of $30. Soon it will be installed by children in Android-powered dishwashers, refrigerators, coffee-pots. They will cost more. But why will that matter? The point is that "the Internet of things" will be powerable by software that provides secure communications to everyone at small additional cost. The point is to defeat despotism, not to watch movies without paying for them. See above.