If they do figure it out their conclusion will be something like outlawing VPNs while handing more infrastructure to Peter Thiel.
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026
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No way they will ban VPNs as it will get in the way of businesses that rely on it / those terminally working from home
Obviously they'll have a carve-out for businesses that apply for a VPN licence and have the other end of the VPN remain in the country. Not because they listen to the public saying that VPNs have legitimate uses, but because the megacorp they consult with before drafting the law says it's the only legitimate use-case and has a VPN product they can sell to small businesses that can't afford to wait for their self-hosted VPN to be certified by the one overworked civil servant who has sole responsibility for approving every VPN licence.
And how are they to determine whats a "vpn"? Just rent a server in another country and ssh tunnel to it, and there you go. Impossible to know your using a 'vpn'.
It's possible to probabilistically determine when an SSH connection is being used like a VPN, then block that traffic. If they go full Great Firewall.
Oi! You got a loicense for that VPN, mate?
outlawing VPNs
What would that even look like?
No two computers can talk to each other without an ISP intermediary?
The UK government certainly don't know. I wouldn't put it past them to do something stupid like banning it on the household level, which would really fuck things up for people who need to use VPNs for their job.
They'll ban it for private individuals and home ISP connections, and allow businesses to pay for a commercial VPN licence.
It's just not that simple, as private individuals do contract work and manage private businesses, large residential and commercial complexes use VPNs to manage high network traffic and guarantee security, and off-site IT support regularly use VPNs for elevated access.
Retail VPNs don't even strictly evade ISPs. They simply route traffic through their own hubs and then on to the destination. If the UK were to "ban VPNs" that wouldn't really stop me from connecting to a US or French based VPN service. And that's what I'd want anyway, since my goal is to not appear to be a UK resident while trafficking data.
I see it being a law that's not generally enforceable, but whose purpose is to empower the authorities to enforce it selectively against targets chosen for political reasons.
Nothing more British than selectively enforcing overbroad legislation against minorities and dissidents.
If it's anything it'll probably be age verification at point of sale for the VPN for retail VPN providers. Pay with a credit card kinda deal. I know that's not ideal, hell none of it is, but I think it's how steam dealt with it and that worked OK.
Protect the children! Except when the children actually need protecting, then we can't do anything!
Pfft, sounds fake, next you'll be telling me the Online Safety Act didn't actually have anything to do with online safety
And that it's not just an act!
Truth is likely, they want to know who you are when browsing but have no backbone to go after any large tech company.
I wonder how many people care enough to use VPN just to access Xitter.
This is particularly dumb because there’s a plenty long history of courts ordering sites to be blocked for piracy.
Labour government confirmed part of the American paedo cabal?
Oh wait, they already have been!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Peter_Mandelson_and_Jeffrey_Epstein
2+2=5
we've always been at war with [REDACTED]
Labor defends pedophiles is all I heard from this.
Sounds par for the course for Kid Starver
Also, we would greatly enjoy if Mr. Musk would come back and lecture every white person on how critical it is for them to overthrow parliament, or they will all be murdered by immigrants.
This reminds me of how Obama posted his hugely popular AMA on Reddit within a year of all the news coverage of all the sick and gross subreddits (pics of dead kids, jailbait etc).
Seems that if a site is big enough shit like this doesn't matter.
Seems that if a site is big enough shit like this doesn’t matter.
which is why we're discussing this on reddit? naw, it does matter, and it builds up into an undeniable train of gross that forces people to other means of communication. Bluesky and Lemmy aren't perfect but they're fantastic compared to the monied shitholes they're replacing.
I suppose what I mean is that from a Government perspective, evidence points to all kinds of shit being forgivable if the platform is big enough.
Hell arguably, aside from replacing Digg, being the wild west of forums is what gave Reddit the volume of audience that would guarantee it the likes of Obama.
I know we're not on Reddit now but the final nail in the coffin that got us all here was API changes to Reddit killing third party clients, not it's history that came before that.