Banning Virtual Private Networks in a Liberal Democracy

The United Kingdom’s current debate about restricting the use or availability of virtual private networks sits at the confluence of three currents: a newly activated online safety regime that has made circumvention politically salient; a surveillance law framework that already equips the state to shape communications security; and a normative settlement under the European Convention on Human Rights that demands necessity and proportionality whenever privacy and expression are curtailed. To assess where policy may go next, one must examine the technical realities of VPNs, the legal levers the UK has already created or proposed, and the constitutional principles against which any restriction will be judged.

Technical foundations and the feasibility of restrictions

A VPN provides three principal properties: traffic confidentiality between the user and the VPN gateway; concealment of destination metadata from the local access provider by tunnelling traffic; and apparent geolocation shift, because exit traffic bears the VPN’s public address. UK authorities worry that those properties can be used to defeat geofenced enforcement measures—most recently, age-assurance obligations that came into force under the Online Safety Act in late July 2025 for high-risk content. Predictably, the rollout triggered a marked surge in VPN downloads and usage within the UK. Regulators have confirmed the age-check duties for adult sites and an enforcement posture, while ministers have said they will look “very closely” at VPN usage patterns linked to circumvention—without announcing an outright ban. 

From a network-engineering standpoint, policymakers possess several levers short of prohibition. Access restriction orders could require internet access providers to block known VPN endpoints (IP address blocking) or domains used in VPN discovery and updates (DNS blocking). Deep packet inspection might attempt to fingerprint common tunnelling protocols such as OpenVPN or WireGuard, or to detect TLS handshakes characteristic of commercial VPN obfuscation layers. App-store measures—compelled de-listing in the UK storefronts—would raise the user’s cost of acquisition, while payment and advertising restrictions would try to shrink the domestic market. Each, however, has limits. IP and DNS blocks are brittle because providers rotate infrastructure; DPI signatures decay as vendors adopt protocol camouflage; and app-store delistings are easily bypassed with direct downloads or alternative stores. Moreover, increasingly widespread use of encrypted-client-hello and QUIC complicates passive identification. In practice, heavy-handed network filtering risks false positives against enterprise VPNs and developer toolchains, and it drives technical escalation by privacy vendors without guaranteeing compliance gains.

The present legal toolkit

Two statutory pillars matter most.

First, the Online Safety Act 2023, now being enforced in staged phases through 2025, arms Ofcom with access-restriction orders and service-restriction orders. Those orders can target both the regulated services themselves and ancillary services that facilitate their provision, a category that Parliament framed to include, for example, app stores, search and advertising intermediaries. Ofcom must obtain court approval for such orders. While the Act was crafted to regulate user-to-user services and search engines, its enforcement architecture is flexible enough to reach the digital ecosystem around non-compliant services. In principle, that includes the ability to require app stores to remove software that is being used to evade age checks; ministers have also commissioned Ofcom to assess the role of VPNs in the efficacy of age-assurance measures. 

Secondly, the Investigatory Powers Act framework—recently revised by the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act 2024 and updated codes—already enables technical capability notices that require telecommunications operators to maintain intercept compatibility and, in certain circumstances, to refrain from deploying or to modify security features that frustrate lawful access. Although VPN providers are not uniformly within the UK jurisdictional perimeter, UK-based communications providers and app-distribution platforms are. The 2024 amendments refined oversight and expanded aspects of data acquisition and retention powers; civil-society and security researchers have argued that, if applied aggressively, such powers could chill the deployment of strong privacy technologies. None of this amounts to a statutory “VPN ban”, but it sketches the pathway by which restrictions on availability, distribution or functionality could be pursued. 

How the OSA could intersect with VPNs in practice

The immediate pressure point is circumvention of age-checks for pornography and other designated harmful content. Ofcom has confirmed the new duties, has begun investigations into non-compliant services, and has published regular bulletins signalling further enforcement. If Ofcom forms the view that circumvention at scale is being facilitated by specific software distribution channels, it could seek court-authorised service-restriction orders against UK app stores or payment intermediaries to remove or demonetise named applications. In parallel, access-restriction orders could require ISPs to block domains or IP ranges used solely to deliver non-compliant services. The political signalling around VPNs since July 2025 reflects that direction of travel: ministers emphasise enforcement against harmful content, express concern about circumvention, and stop short of criminalising possession or use of VPN software. Whether this evolves into sustained pressure on VPN distributors will turn on Ofcom’s empirical report to Parliament about the scale of circumvention and the effectiveness of mitigations. 

Legal constraints and litigation risk

Any move that substantially burdens general-purpose privacy tools will meet three overlapping legal tests.

First is proportionality under Articles 8 and 10 ECHR (incorporated domestically through the Human Rights Act): interferences with private life and expression must be prescribed by law, pursue a legitimate aim, and be necessary in a democratic society. Blunt measures that block lawful, beneficial uses (for example, remote work, journalistic source protection, or domestic abuse survivors’ safety planning) will face a steep proportionality hurdle. The Open Internet implications are not hypothetical: UK and international media have already documented the collateral effects of broad age-verification regimes on privacy and speech, and the widespread turn to VPNs in response underscores the strength of the countervailing interest. 

Secondly, UK data-protection law and Ofcom’s own guidance on “highly effective” age-assurance techniques require operators to adopt methods that are accurate and fair. If state measures push platforms toward identity-linking models, the privacy risk of centralised stores of sensitive age-verification data must be justified and managed; indiscriminate suppression of privacy-enhancing technologies because they make poor designs easier to evade is unlikely to satisfy necessity or data-minimisation principles.

Thirdly, administrative law constraints apply. Ofcom must act within the four corners of its statutory powers, consult appropriately, and evidence the efficacy of any restriction. Service-restriction orders require court oversight, creating a venue in which technologists can present less restrictive alternatives and demonstrate false-positive rates.

Normative evaluation

The normative case for restricting VPNs is at its strongest where a narrow, well-evidenced harm requires a precise remedy—say, targeted measures against specific circumvention toolchains baked into child-abuse forums. But the general case for reducing ordinary citizens’ access to privacy infrastructure is weak. VPNs support a range of legitimate objectives: securing traffic on public Wi-Fi, reducing tracking-based profiling, protecting whistle-blowers and journalists, and enabling routine business connectivity. Treating circumvention as a justification for suppressing such tools misdiagnoses the policy failure. If a safety scheme hinges on identity revelation at scale, citizens will predictably seek to compartmentalise that identity information; stamping out the compartmentalisation tool neither eliminates the demand nor guarantees compliance. A more sustainable path is to design child-protection measures that do not require the universal de-anonymisation of adult users, and to combine platform-side friction, product safety by design, and targeted criminal enforcement.

Policy outlook

In the near term, three developments are likely. First, Ofcom will continue case-by-case enforcement against non-compliant services and publish its assessment of VPNs’ impact on age-assurance effectiveness; this will frame any future proposals directed at distribution channels for privacy software. Secondly, government will lean on app-store governance and payment rails rather than attempt a criminal ban, because network-level blocking is leaky and a ban would be legally and politically fraught. Thirdly, surveillance-law capabilities under the IPA, as amended, will remain the primary avenue for targeted access to communications, with continued debate about whether technical capability notices should ever be used to weaken security features.

A prudent settlement would explicitly separate three categories: lawful general-purpose VPNs; VPN features intentionally marketed for unlawful evasion of court orders; and platform-embedded circumvention aids in illegal-content markets. Only the latter two justify restrictive interventions, and even then the measures should be precise, time-limited, and reviewable. Anything broader risks collateral damage to privacy, security and economic activity, and stands on shaky ground under the UK’s human-rights commitments.

The UK has chosen to pursue ambitious online safety goals while preserving a rules-based commitment to privacy and expression. The legal tools it has created—the Online Safety Act’s service and access restrictions and the IPA’s investigatory powers—are powerful enough to chill or to calibrate. Whether “restrictions upon VPN services” become an enduring feature of the British internet depends less on political rhetoric about circumvention than on regulatory craftsmanship, judicial scrutiny, and a willingness to build safety systems that do not depend upon dissolving private spaces online. For now, VPNs remain lawful in the Unied Kingdom, ministers speak of scrutiny rather than prohibition, and Ofcom’s early enforcement focuses on the services that host harmful content, not the privacy tools citizens use. That is the right starting point, and it should remain the lodestar as the regime matures.