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UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill
(www.birminghammail.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Eh, a back bencher has called for a report on how VPNs interfere with ofcoms ability to enforce/regulate the online safety act within 6 months.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-safety-bill-labour-champion-b2239810.html
The likely conclusion of that report is that "VPNs circumvent the age verification requirement, so circumvent the OSA, so VPNs must be banned"
Yes, I read that. 'Likely conclusion' does not equal a ban though.
I'm just being a bit pedantic about the headline - this whole thing is crappy (and unworkable) enough as it is, without jumping to conclusions.
The only other solutions to "VPNs circumvent OSA" are:
Licence/regulate VPN usage (which is essentially a ban WRT the OSA).
Extremely difficult to do. It's fairly trivial to just tunnel your connection over SSH to a VPS in another country.
Also fairly trivial to get a VPN that tunnels over a websocket, making the traffic identical to website traffic.
The government is going to play cat&mouse with decades of legitimate infosec.
Do something progressive, and drop the OSA (which isn't going to happen).
They've literally just implemented these laws. It's not getting repealed.
They are going to make consumer use of anything that changes the public source address of a packet illegal.
How they enforce that, I dunno.
Like the whole OSA, it seems really poorly thought out. I dunno how they completely overlooked VPN usage
It’s about time we banned CGNAT.
Somehow I don't see this being a popular move