Until governments try to ban VPNs...
Then you're into "what about all TLS connections" which can be used to send traffic, so you have to do TLS interception at scale, which is a very non-trivial problem to try and solve.
Then you're into non-TLS encrypted protocols, so your only option there is to block anything you can't intercept.....
At that point you've pretty much broken Internet access in your country, might as well just chop the cables :P
For the UK I'm kind of doubting they'll put enough money into it to make it good, so we'll get the ineffective version and politicians will get stories like this one written about their efforts.
They're still going to try anyway though. Wisconsin is already putting up a hilariously bad anti-VPN bill[2], and I'm curious if they don't just end up trying to ban every server provider out there in the process of enforcing it.
This also has the benefit (to the government) of criminalising individuals, making prosecution much easier and allowing it to be more selective according to the government's whims. It reminds me of the way the US dealt with piracy, you could go after a bunch of college kids to make a point etc.
In a fully authoritarian state of course you likely don't have to worry too much about proof, but I'd suggest the UK has a ways to go for that.
On the piracy front, well we've seen how successful they were in stopping piracy.... not at all.
This should not give you /any/ comfort that they won't attempt to ban VPNs. It's as easy as making it illegal to purchase/use a VPN/proxy service as a non-business entity with some loosely drafted legislation that would scare people.
It's child's play to draft legislation that would not affect businesses, plus some appropriate PR/propaganda campaigns
If they're going down that route I'd expect the first service to be banned will be Tor, I'm actually mildly surprised they haven't tried that already.
It really is easy. You can not outsmart lawmakers here, if they are determined enough.
It doesn't have to be 100% perfect, just 80% plus some messaging (edit: and harsh penalties). Do you not accept this?
As to wording of the law, eg:
"A Commercial VPN is defined as a service offered to the public for remuneration that routes internet traffic through servers to obscure the subscriber's IP address or apparent geographic location, where the primary purpose is to provide anonymity or circumvent geo-restrictions."
"A Business VPN is defined as a virtual private network operated by or on behalf of an organisation to enable employees, contractors, or authorised agents to securely access the organisation's internal network resources; connect geographically separate premises of the same organisation; or comply with data protection or security obligations."
While we still have alternate operating systems, that won't be a universal control of course. You'd have to stop people owning general purpose computing devices for that to be fully effective.
That's been the corporate and probably governmental wet dream since the iPhone released. I think the only thing keeping the x86_64 scene from doing the same thing is legacy software support, and open alternatives existing. If Microsoft could've viably banned getting software from anywhere outside their store, they would have.
I would argue with all the computers they sold in "S mode" a few years ago, they earnestly tried it in the home market.