Proton has announced a $1.27 million donation to digital rights and privacy organizations following its 2025 Lifetime Account Charity Fundraiser, the company’s largest to date.
The 2025 fundraiser, held annually since Proton launched its first campaign eight years ago, drew over 50,000 participants who purchased more than 100,000 tickets. Community support generated $1,073,800, and Proton topped up the amount with an additional $200,000 contribution. The final donation of $1,273,800 will be distributed among 10 organizations selected by the Proton community, along with additional past recipients.
Proton is best known for its suite of privacy-focused tools including Proton Mail and Proton VPN. Operating out of Switzerland, the company positions itself as a leader in the fight against online surveillance, censorship, and Big Tech monopolies.
The organizations benefiting from the 2025 fundraiser span a wide range of advocacy and technical domains:
- EDRi (European Digital Rights), a coalition of over 50 groups across Europe, focuses on legislation and policy around encryption, surveillance, and digital freedoms.
- Digitale Gesellschaft, a Swiss nonprofit, advises individuals and institutions on digital rights and promotes consumer protection in the tech sector.
- NLnet Foundation in the Netherlands funds small-scale open-source projects that support internet freedom and decentralization.
- WITNESS equips activists and journalists with tools and training to verify media and expose human rights violations, including efforts to combat deepfakes and AI-generated misinformation.
- Hack Club, which supports thousands of teenagers in building open-source tech with an emphasis on privacy and transparency.
- The Center for Humane Technology, known for its critique of attention-extractive tech platforms, is working to align AI development with human well-being.
- Transparency International, a global anti-corruption network, uses the funds to strengthen its push for accountability and anti-corruption reform.
- Lighthouse Reports, a journalism initiative focused on exposing abuse of power by governments and corporations.
- Open Markets Institute, which promotes antitrust reform to curb the influence of tech monopolies on democracy and civil discourse.
- The Insider, an independent Russian media outlet working under intense state pressure to report on censorship, repression, and war crimes.
This year’s fundraiser was also marked by a technical hiccup involving duplicate raffle ticket numbers due to a malfunction in a third-party app. Proton reports the issue has been resolved and has contacted all participants with instructions to verify their entries. Winners of the Lifetime Account raffle and social contest have been notified via email and will receive a special gift along with lifetime access to Proton services.
Proton emphasized that the impact of these donations goes beyond the funds alone. The company continues to provide free access to its encrypted services in high-risk regions, most recently, in Venezuela and Egypt, supports open-source development, and advocates against surveillance legislation and internet censorship.
The “Open Market Institute” (OMI) is not what it says on the tin. While most would expect “open” to mean “free,” OMI is a rent-seeking institution that seeks to gain political influence to choose winners and losers in the marketplace; i.e. , OMI wants to rig the marketplace to meet its own political aims. It is fine to criticize an organization, e.g. Google or Meta, that many of us have issues with. Note that both can be avoided, if so desired. But OMI and its ilk will be any large organization they have political beef with as a “monopoly,” and seek government favoritism to enforce their views over the views of anyone else. It was well understood, until recently, that a monopoly was ipso facto a government granted monopoly. In a government monopoly, e.g. the AT&T of a number of decades ago, you had to use AT&T, because the government said so.
Most importantly, regulations are subject to regulatory capture, which inevitably occurs once the government is placed in control over an industry. The largest and most powerful corporations will ensure that burdensome regulations, sold as being in “the public interest,” are easily absorbable costs of doing business, while making staying in business for smaller competitors a ruinous proposition, raising barriers to entry, and leaving consumers significantly worse off than before ostensibly well-intentioned pressure groups began to intervene in the business and choices of others.
The so-called” “Open” in “Open Market Institute” means political control and economic sclerosis, a closed and more expensive market, where economic success relies on who has the most pull with the politicians. OMI’s novel and bizarre concept of legal monopoly, that of “bigness'” has been tried before, and it always has and inevitably always lead to the very “monopolies” it would pretend to oppose.