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  • 4 comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 13th, 2025
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696800

    Hi,

    Mullvad has two owners, founders, and CEOs - Daniel Berntsson, and me, Fredrik Strömberg. All posts I’ve seen yesterday and today, including the newspaper articles, talk about Mullvad as if Daniel is the single owner, founder and CEO. It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission.

    If you have any questions, comments or concerns you’re welcome to comment on this thread, or email our customer support.

    See below for the response you’ll get from support:


    Mullvad is a political company. We fight for freedom of speech, freedom of information and the right to privacy. These are firmly held values of the founders of Mullvad.

    Mullvad protects the right for people to express things we don’t agree with. We protect the right of everyone to access views we don’t agree with.

    We also live these values by being tolerant in our daily work. Everyone is welcome to collaborate with Mullvad if they share these narrow core values. As employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, lobbyists, campaign partners or whatever it might be. No matter what their other opinions are and no matter whether the founders or anyone else in Mullvad dislike them. The founders themselves fundamentally disagree on several important issues.

    This is what allows us to advance our common causes. Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking.

    The more people do this, the better a place the world will be.

    It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission, in the same way that someone’s opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn’t.

    That said, if you no longer want to be a Mullvad customer for philosophical reasons, we think it’s important to honor that. In that case, reach out to support.

  • Google’s introduction of AI Overviews in 2024 broke that bargain. Instead of the list of familiar blue links that previously sat at the top of Google’s search page, the new AI Overviews used the content of those links — effectively the actual news reporting — to create a summary, while pushing down and out of sight the links from which it was scraped.

    This is what The Verge’s Nilay Patel calls “Google Zero.” Google scrapes the internet for content, without paying, then reassembles it on its own site, so users never leave. Readers get the news without visiting the source that reported it. And until now, if anyone did choose to opt out of being scraped for AI Overviews, Google would only let you do that by also crippling your presence in Search. So in effect, say no and Google forces you off Search.

    Nice news website you have there. Be a shame if someone de-listed it.

    Publishers faced an impossible choice: allow Google to steal and repurpose their work for AI systems without payment and eventually go out of business, or object, disappear from the internet and probably go out of business even faster.

    The CMA has now rightly recognized that this is no choice at all and ordered Google to allow news publishers to opt out — without being removed from the internet entirely.