This is the nuclear option, it's not being sued, it's being in a remote location with only one local ISP that provides service to your area, getting caught torrenting, and then having the ISP terminate your service. You are fucked.
About 15 years ago this happened to me they canceled my internet and I was super bummed. For some reason like 2 days later with the modem still hooked up but no internet I tried using my VPN and bam I was back online I still don't understand how but through the vpn I still had internet for like 6 months
Sounds like they could have been lazy and simply disabled/blocked your dns lookups, or stopped providing your route to 0.0.0.0/0. VPN provides new dns provider and a route to the internet at large, and you’re back in business.
It couldn't be a routing issue, because they'd never be able to get past the modem out to the rest of the world.
The DNS one is a pretty good guess. Another is that they were just doing HTTP redirects on every lookup. If this was >14 years ago, FireSheep had not been released yet (2010) and most sites only did HTTPS for authentication, and browsers didn't really try HTTPS first. So a lazy but semi competent admin could just redirect all the port 53/80 traffic and hose a normal browsing session, but a VPN coming up with direct IP config would bypass that and bring them back online.