Same with airplanes not wanting to land where you want to go. Selfish bastards!
I am pretty sure it’s a dude. From mayor to president is a big jump, although we have seen worse with less knowledge and he got in.
I use testmy.net. It’s small enough so ISP don’t try to cheat on the speed test with them and testmy are actively proud of the fact they aren’t in bed with any of them. On top of it all it also checks for latency.
You can set up a "self hosted" VPN on a cloud service like Linode but you still would have to pay for their service which is $5 US a month for 1TB of traffic. the advantage is that you can make sure there are no logs and once it's setup it's fairly maintenance free. This guide is a bit older but i used back then which worked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxpX_mubz2A&t=685s. PS i don't use it anymore but would if my situation changes.
edited to add "self hosted"
Shitty for them to do that to you. Would it impact your next job or your wallet so much that you can’t just tell them to fuck off and just walk away?