Anonymity and therefore privacy. An ISP-assigned IP address reveals a lot of information about you. With a court order it can be traced back to you. Suppose a dissident wants to publish information adverse to the government, there's a situation.
Most (all?) streaming services are geo-locked, and do not contain the same libraries in different markets (if they are available at all.)
So VPNs are a common way of accessing streaming which would otherwise be unavailable.
While this is "piracy of a sort", it does imply an actual paid subscription, albeit in the wrong territory. So its more-honest than the alternative (plex etc)
Net good, net bad, somewhere in between?
That said, I'm aware my stuff is pirated, for various reasons, and I pretty much ignore that. Pirate users might turn into customers one day. I make minimal effort to prevent piracy, mostly to make sure the experience for paid users is as simple and streamlined as possible.
I prefer to consume my media via paid channels, and that is easy and convenient (and cheap) to do (now) so that's much easier to do now than it was 20 years ago.
My attitude to open source licensing is the same. I'll happily integrate MIT licensed material into commercial offerings, but I respect the rights of GPL authors, and I understand that is off the table. I believe authors have a right to choose the license they want, commercial, open or free, and it's up to me to respect that right.
In general my view is "piracy bad, working around geo-blocks ok".
Interestingly this roughly reflects the view of regulators in my jurisdiction[1]:
> The Productivity Commission (PC) in December 2016 recommended that the Government make it easier for consumers to access legitimate copyright-protected content by:
> amending the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) to make clear that the circumvention of geo-blocking technology by consumers is not an infringement of copyright; and
> avoiding international obligations that would prevent or ban consumers from circumventing geo-blocking technology.
> the ACCC supported the PC’s recommendation,
[1] https://incompetition.com.au/2017/12/blocking-geo-blocking/
In what case would a commercial VPN provider, which will have a payment path associated to you, be better than something like Tor for the sort of user who fears government retribution?
Commercial VPN services are pretty much exclusively for doing things that annoy copyright holders. They're great for that, but for almost any other use case where one might want a VPN they're not the best choice.
Even tor, if not used very carefully.