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Encrypt. EVERYTHING. It's the power we do have, and it might be the only power.

Yep, I pretty much already do exactly that. Cheap VPS provider + VPN for a good fraction of my home network traffic.

If my ISP wants to pay me in the form of a discounted price in exchange for my browsing data then I'll reconsider my position.

A problem there is that many VPNs sell our data as well. Even if they say they don't sell it, we have no way of proving they don't.

Then run your own openvpn service on a VPS, it's not that hard.

You still have an ISP, via the VPS provider. You also risk your traffic being deprioritized (or dropped) by your local ISP.

In my mind, a commercial VPS provider has little incentive to perform data mining of a particular customer's traffic vs a residential ISP.

Could AWS, Digital Ocean, Linode, <insert other low end hosts> all be trying to? Sure, I guess? Is it really central to their business model? I think that is a bit of a stretch so I'm comfortable trusting my tunneled traffic to them.

They have a lot to lose, considering how much anyone in that space would love to snap up market share.

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