I trust the (more than not at all) regulated space of ISPs in my country more than I do the unregulated space of people running VPNs out of their basements. It's important to be clear: you're just moving trust from one entity (your ISP) to another (the company / human who runs the VPN). It's not clear to me why the VPN people are more trustworthy than ISPs.
In my country, the UK, ISPs are legally required to retain logs of customer activity for 12 months. A VPN has no such legal requirement.
So while I can't be 100% sure that my VPN is monitoring me, I can be 100% sure my ISP is. Additionally, my VPN has a financial incentive not to log customer data, or at the very least, not to be caught doing it.
(I'm currently using IVPN (https://www.ivpn.net/). It's on the more expensive side, though that isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it supports multihop over OpenVPN, and the experimental Wireguard protocol.)
Surely it's because it is their business model.
ISP's have been proven to snoop and inject into traffic. They sell your data to those that have money. This is a breach of your privacy.
On the other hand if a VPN provider were caught doing that, it would be abandoned by it's customers overnight. It is the primary risk to the business.
With VPN services I have a choice, but with an ISP they hold most of the cards (I can leave them once my contract is up). ISP's take your trust and abuse it, VPN's have to earn it.
I don't neccesarily trust them, but they haven't done anything "evil" or questionable yet.
My opinion is not that ISPs are correctly regulated, or even well regulated, but that they have more than zero amounts of regulation applied to them. They also tend to be larger and slower to do things like collapse and rename themselves. This leads them, in my mind, to be better than a VPN company by default.
By default, mind: certain people may have certain use cases that propel a VPN over an ISP. For example, I am friends with people who live in countries that need VPNs to bypass ISPs controlled by dictatorships / corrupt regimes (I'm being intentionally vague here). However, that is not most people, and IMO VPNs being more private than the average ISP is an illusion.
PS: By "interesting" I did not mean "paid shill", like you seemed to assume.
Both are five eyes countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...
You're ignoring continents worth of countries and billions of people to get there though.
That's got nothing to do with privacy particularly, which is the direction my opinion is coming from (rightly or wrongly).