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Originally Posted by anonjohn
I suppose this might be possible if every ISP had a list of every approved IP address for almost every medium and large business which used VPN. But what about the huge number of small businesses and organizations and the self-employed who use commercial VPNs like NordVPN or Proton VPN to connect to base - or rolled their own VPN using eg OpenVPN?
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In practice, one does quite the opposite. ISPs don't whitelist sites, they blacklist them. So, for VPNs, businesses that use their own VPN for their employees would be automatically fine, as would be those who use Cisco's Anyconnect (the majority of those I know of in the UK), or other similar services, whose first step of the connection, incidentally, is on a server of the organization (so, a UK domain). The rest can be blocked.
Quote:
Originally Posted by anonjohn
My main point is not to argue over what governments and individual politicians might or might not be planning - time will tell. But to show that it is practically impossible for a government to enforce "highly effective" age verification online while also preserving privacy and preventing blackmail.
VPNs are an obvious way of evading one country's blocks. But trying to block some or all VPNs brings another shedload of practical difficulties for businesses and organizations. The well-meaning attempts at protecting children in this way, is probably impossible in practice.
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On this, we certainly agree, except on the small detail that I don't think that blocking VPNs will bring difficulties for businesses (see above).