Abstract:Web-measurement studies treat commercial VPNs as interchangeable vantage points within a country, assuming that any VPN in a particular country is as good as any other. We show that this assumption does not hold: the same country measured through different VPN providers yields materially different conclusions about where endpoints sit, who hosts them, and which physical replicas serve them. Using large-scale browser-based measurements across fourteen countries and four major VPN providers, complemented by targeted DNS and replica-selection probes, we examine sources of this variability across three layers of the VPN-to-endpoint path: vantage identity, name resolution, and replica selection. We find that the variability is driven primarily by layers below the client: commercial VPN providers operate their own in-country DNS infrastructure, often intercepting queries regardless of client configuration; CDNs steer on the exit network, sending identical queries to different replicas; and peering paths route identical DNS answers to different physical facilities. We distill these findings into a set of reporting practices for VPN-based Web measurement.
From: Alexander Gamero-Garrido [view email]
[v1]
Fri, 29 May 2026 00:36:28 UTC (161 KB)
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