Because VPN is a service, not a piece of software. You're paying third parties for the service, and those third parties use the money to maintain the infrastru

Because VPN is a service, not a piece of software. You're paying third parties for the service, and those third parties use the money to maintain the infrastructure powerful enough for each user to have high speed VPN service (nobody's gonna use a VPN that throttles the speed by 90%) across different geographical regions. If Microsoft and Apple wanted to offer a VPN as a first-party service out of the box, they would be forced to maintain a pretty complex infrastructure across multiple regions and somehow be able to support way more traffic than any third party VPN provider (because of their name). So, where's the money for the infrastructure going to come from? In Facebook's case, form mining the data. I would argue that Apple isn't stupid enough to attempt something like that, and as for Google, they already do have a first-party VPN integrated into Android[0]. I would argue that the reason that third-party VPNs are shady is because they need a large infrastructure in place before they can offer the service. Once they do have the infrastructure in place, they're not making profit, but covering their losses, while at the same time being forced to scale even further. [0] On Nexus/Pixel devices from certain regions that activates automatically when connected to an insecure WiFi: https://www.howtogeek.com/275474/how-to-use-androids-wi-fi-assistant-to-keep-your-phone-safe-on-public-networks/ https://www.howtogeek.com/275474/how-to-use-androids-wi-fi-a...