We’ve talked about how, in the digital space at least, the concept of “ownership” has undergone a massive philisophical shift. It used to be that you would go out somewhere, buy a thing, and own that thing. When the product is digital, however, or if it is connected to the internet and subject to firmware and software updates that change the product post purchase, you never really own the product. In fact, according to most EULAs and the like, you merely “license” the product. That means the thing you bought on Monday may not be the product or service you actually get on Friday, if the manufacturer or maker decides to make a change. And the response you get from industry is a reminder that you didn’t buy a thing; you bought a limited license to a thing that can be altered, rescinded, or bricked at the maker’s whim.

It’s a dystopia that we’ve come to accept, unfortunately. But you get to a whole new level of absurd when you don’t actually own the license you bought, either. More specifically, when you buy a “lifetime license” to a VPN service, only to have the company be sold and the new owners yank that lifetime subcription from you without prior notice.

The new owners of VPN provider VPNSecure have drawn ire after canceling lifetime subscriptions. The owners told customers that they didn’t know about the lifetime subscriptions when they bought VPNSecure, and they cannot honor the purchases.

A copy of the email from “The VPN Secure Team” and posted on Reddit notes that VPNSecure had previously deactivated accounts with lifetime subscriptions that it said hadn’t been used in “over 6 months.” The message noted that VPNSecure was acquired in 2023, “including the technology, domain, and customer database—but not the liabilities.”

It gets worse. According to the new owners, they claim the sellers didn’t even tell them about these lifetime subscriptions and that usage and support requests for them were saturating the service, all sans any income for the new ownership. How true any of that is would be completely unknown to this writer, obviously, but it’s also besides the point. If the seller obfuscated usership in the sale, that should be taken up with the seller. The current owners claim they can’t do that because the costs of a lawsuit would outpace what they spent on the purchase to begin with. Which, hey, that sucks pretty hard if all of this is true, but I’m failing to see why that should keep in purchases made in good faith from being honored.

Unfortunately, the previous owner did not disclose that thousands of Lifetime Deals (LTDs) had been sold through platforms like StackSocial.

We discovered this only months later—when a large portion of our resources were strained by these LTD accounts and high support volume from users, who through part of the database, provided no sustaining income to help us improve and maintain the service.

We actually offered VPNSecure lifetime subscriptions in one of our own “Daily Deal” posts. There is a lot of disbelief floating out there about just what these new owners knew about these subscriptions and when they knew it. It’s important to note that checking the history of the VPNSecure website doesn’t reveal that lifetime subs were ever offered there. Instead, they appear to have been offered through third parties like StackCommerce, which is who Techdirt partners with. When we asked StackCommerce directly about this whole fiasco, we were provided with this statement.

“As a marketplace, StackCommerce connects consumers with exclusive digital deals offered by third-party providers. While we strive to curate high-quality, long-term offers, we do not own or operate the products sold through our platform. In rare cases where a provider is acquired or discontinues operations, we unfortunately have no control over how those new entities choose to honor existing agreements. We understand the frustration this can cause and are actively working with impacted customers to offer support and explore possible solutions.”

Any real due diligence by the new owners should have uncovered all of this. If they didn’t do their jobs as part of the acquisition, well, sucks for them.

Again, how that translates into ripping away a subscription from a customer who bought them in good faith is beyond me. How those subs were discontinued without notice, with emails going out to those affected only after the complaints started rolling in, is also a valid question and a method for assuredly pissing people off.

VPNSecure could’ve potentially mitigated backlash by giving users more advanced warning of the changes and a longer opportunity to select a new subscription before deactivating their accounts. We can’t confirm if InfiniteQuant Ltd. knew about the lifetime subscriptions before making its purchase. However, the firm claims to have known about the subscriptions a few months after taking ownership, so it had ample time to warn customers before abruptly deactivating “dormant” accounts and killing the subscriptions of thousands of customers.

So if we don’t own what we’ve bought, and we don’t even own the licenses under the terms we bought them either, then what exactly are we getting whenever we hand over the money we’ve earned?

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