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It seems unlikely that VPNs will ever become completely illegal, at least not in the US. Too many very large companies use them for Congress to consider it. They may make them illegal for non-corporate uses, but that would be difficult to enforce and overall useless.

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I can easily see governments forcing ISPs to blacklist the IP addresses of known VPN servers. I'm only slightly surprised that this hasn't happened yet in the UK and other such places. The first step is to try to ban direct access to websites. Then they'll likely try to ban the workarounds. Yes, power users will always find a way around these things, but it will work to stop many, I suspect.

And as for corporate/government VPN users, maybe this will be an excuse to introduce a VPN "license" for those who will be allowed to use them.

The big tech companies I've worked for use VPN heavily for remote workers, so my first reaction was, "This could never happen."

But now that you mention it, I could see a situation where domestic VPN providers are forced to log user data (or be on the hook for copyright violations when the VPN is used by employees) and ISPs are strong-armed into blacklisting overseas VPN providers. That's actually kind of scary.

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