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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Next step: the same government that is demanding the age verification will ban VPNs.

Yep.

> For example, in 2025, Wisconsin lawmakers escalated their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN. Another proposed Michigan bill requires “An internet service provider providing internet service in this state [to] actively monitor and block known circumvention tools.” Circumvention tools being: VPNs.

https://www.eff.org/pages/vpns-are-not-solution-age-gating-m...

Everyone seems to forget that using VPNs to violate your local laws gives lots of good ammo to the authoritarians that want to ban VPNs. The answer isn't to use a VPN to get around it (and thus give fodder to your enemies) but to change the law.

While I agree with this in spirit, here in the UK both major parties along with the public at large generally support these types of laws.

Two of the major parties support it, but it's not entirely obvious how much public support there is; it's not most people's top issue, and it's easy to make polls say what you want depending on the question you ask.

You'd get different answers if, for instance, you ask "do you want to have to show ID or submit a picture of your face in order to access many sites on the Internet".

The entire concept of public support breaks down when the majority of the public doesn't actually know what a VPN is.

I'm not sure there'd be much of a difference because the British people are broadly speaking a rather paternalistic society.

I would guess the vast majority of parents support these laws. They are disgusted with the social media platforms who shrug and pretend they are just dumb pipes when it comes to filth, predators, and harmful content, while at the same time keeping users engaged with addictive algorithms and tracking everything every user does and knowing everything about them.

I sincerely doubt that the average UK (or US, or French, or German) citizen even knows what a VPN is beyond "that thing you sign in to for porn," let alone knows enough about it to have an informed opinion on the laws surrounding them.

Neither does the average politician, so where exactly is the impetus for changing the law going to come from?

But it's easier to ask a relative few ISPs to block VPNs than it is to police the behavior of millions of individuals.

Not especially feasible if you want to support businesses. More likely is trying to demand that VPNs also enforce age verification, which business-targeted VPNs might do, and then ban the ones that don't.

I doubt this would be workable.

They could, sadly, however, make it a crime to bypass things like The Online Safety Bill. Downloading or using Tor, for example.

At that point, the only sane option is to become a criminal.

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