They can be effectively criminalized, but no they can't be banned without transitioning to closed intranet.

Age checks on buying a VPN is probably how they'll move this forward. Same situation as the age checks in porn. Use a VPN to download a VPN.

There's no way, as the article says, to identify which traffic is a legit business on or a private one.

Also, I think, a proxy will achieve the same goal for appearing in another country. Sure it's not private but the gov are looking at VPN specifically.

Sure you could ban VPNs — just as easily as you could ban newspapers.

This is utterly stupid and I agree it needs to be highlighted however it's worth pointing out that a public consultation doesn't mean squat.

They're asking the general public if they think that VPNs should be regulated. They are not asking experts for feasibility studies. So even if we take it as red that this is 100% definitely going to happen, they are at stage -1 of the process right now, and we all know the speed which politics moves (continental drift in slow motion).

I would actually be perfectly prepared to put money on this not actually happening. Labour do not need more reasons for people to hate them.

The mere title of the article shows how little they know about how VPN's work

I mean, they could ban commercial VPN service providers from accepting payments using operators operating with a legal presence in the UK.

They're going to have an exceedingly difficult time preventing tunneled traffic from moving from within the UK to an IP address located outside the UK, though. Especially if they aren't aiming to criminalize British users with harsh penalties, and I think that making 13-year-old Junior a felon for aiming to see pornography probably just isn't going to be on from a political standpoint.

Yeah in the same way that lying and saying "yes, pornhub, I am 18" is banned.

I mean that's probably a bad example given the age check stuff, but you get the point.

Yes. It is very feasible for any government to do this.

Is it likely? Thats a completely different question not asked by the headline.