With the UK apparently floating ideas of a VPN ban it’s got me worried about the future of anonymity online. Now people have already pointed out that a VPN ban doesn’t make sense because of all the legitimate uses of one and wouldn’t even be enforceable anyway, but that got me thinking.
What if governments ordered websites (such as social media sites) to block traffic originating from a VPN node? Lots of sites already do this (or restrict your activity if they detect a VPN) to mitigate spam etc. and technically that wouldn’t interfere with “legitimate” (in the eyes of the gov) VPN usage like logging onto corporate networks remotely
It’s already a pain with so many sites either blocking you from access or making you jump through a million captchas using VPNs now. I’m worried it’s about to get a whole lot worse
That’s the whole point of the discussion: what does “VPN” mean in this context? Is it only these VPN providers that let you be elsewhere, or VPN technology and traffic in general. The prior could be limited by blocking traffic to specific IP addresses that belong to VPN providers, albeit in a very laborious and expensive cat and mouse game. The latter would affect all VPN traffic including that which is used to safely connect to work sites for example. Which would be stupid and damaging.
Even if VPN providers could be banned at IP level, what’s stopping you from spinning up a host in another country, setting up wireguard on that?
I understand they are frustrated that their excellent child protection plans and user information gathering is so easy to circumvent, but their proposed solutions are just absurd.
If you have a VPN then chances are you have a credit card, which means you are an adult, which means you can access porn. The VPN is your age verification :)
No, there are free VPN out there where you don’t need an creditcard (Windscribe, Proton, Calyx…), even if not, it can be a child on the PC from the parents. Anyway, age verification has only one reason, access and control of user data, nothing else. The resposability of the children is by the Parents and not by webpages or services, apart impossible to control the access by childrens, when they use the PC of the parents to websites which already have the ID from the adults. Nobody else as the parents can control it. Apart it isn’t a rule which is worldwide, with countries without age control in their server, easy accesible from everywhere but out of the control by goverments.
I forgot about the free VPN services. Good point. But yes, the government shouldnt be the ones raising our kids. As you said, this is all about control and getting information. Nothing more.