{"paper":{"title":"Not All Roads Lead to Rome: How VPN Selection Alters What We Measure and Infer about Web Infrastructure","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.NI","authors_text":"Alexander Gamero-Garrido, Robert Ricci, Sachin Kumar Singh","submitted_at":"2026-05-29T00:36:28Z","abstract_excerpt":"Web-measurement studies treat commercial VPNs as interchangeable vantage points within a country, assuming that any VPN in a particular country is as good as any other. We show that this assumption does not hold: the same country measured through different VPN providers yields materially different conclusions about where endpoints sit, who hosts them, and which physical replicas serve them. Using large-scale browser-based measurements across fourteen countries and four major VPN providers, complemented by targeted DNS and replica-selection probes, we examine sources of this variability across "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.30692","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.30692/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}