UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

This is very bad news because I have been in contact with low cost providers (lowendtalk) and the community & even they usually end up renting etc. from datacenters and they usually would have name as well

So theoretically, suppose I have a vpn company on A) either such lowend niche providers who might support let's say my mission or we are aligned or B) the hyperscalers or large companies.

Now I am 99% sure that large companies would actually restrict VPN creation usage (something remarkably rare right now but still it's a gone deal now)

And I feel like even with niche lowendbox providers, suppose I am paying 4 euros or something to a provider to get an IP, they are either using hyperscaler themselves (like OVH) or part of a datacenter itself

If a server they own in some capacity runs a vps, can it be considered that they are running a vps and they can get sued by the Safety Act too? If not, then what if this happens one layer above at datacenter and now datacenters might have to comply with them

I haven't read the article but wtf.

Suppose I run a tmate instance (basically allows you to connect one ssh server to another both inside nat), theoretically this is a vpn as well.

I was calling out that they might ban vpn's when online safety act came and I realized that theoretically nothing's stopping them technologically to do so. It's a cat and mouse game but they didn't have a legal reason to do it so much. Now... You have it.

Is the end of total privacy for UK here?

I feel like even privacy oriented VPN's will move out of UK and non privacy oriented (ie. who will accept your id's) will probably have to manage it or use some third party and I am pretty sure that this basically gives govt. even more, they might now look at which IP said something, contact the now compliant VPN and block other truly private, for which user Id used a particular IP at particular time and seek their ID. I don't know how Dystopian UK's gotten but what's stopping a "reasonable cause" or some UK fbi equivalent contacting.

I feel like even one or two such extreme case of VPN providers would be enough to scare the whole country into check where if you are UK citizen and you talk against UK online, you will be screwed.

Atleast that's the direction I am seeing it heading.

Depending on the instance & how many more such dystopian laws UK adds. It's democracy gets really questionable... and I am not sure what it will be replaced by.

Both parties are kind of aligned in this from what I can tell. Just raise what "reasonable" suspicion to contact means and abuse any laws or create new dystopian laws but online safety act wasn't okay but VPN's provided a way around it.

Now that VPN's themselves are affected. It's kind of gonna wreak havoc imo of any individual privacy.

I am worried what this might mean on tor. Since tor can be considered a vpn, so will UK company sue me if I run a tor instance now?

I'm very interested to see how some VPN providers react to this. For a zero logs VPN provider, if such a thing can really exist, how big of a problem is this? Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file? Usage remains the same? Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK.

Of course, we're sliding quite rapidly down that slippery slope here so I'm sure logging and easier government tracking would be next. The justifications will get weaker and even more lacking in supporting evidence for their implementation.

> If you do not agree with an amendment then write to your MP, write to the ministers concerned. If you do not tell them your concerns they will not know.

It is an utter waste of time. MPs already know about the concerns. They don't care. I wrote to my MP about many of these concerns in the past. You either get ignored, told you are enabling pedos, told there will be protections put in place (ignoring the whole point is that I don't trust the government), or you get a boilerplate reply.

Moreover The vast majority of people (unfortunately this includes people in my own family) have been propagandised to agree with all iffy censorship, monitoring and other spooky nonsense the UK state engages with.

What I find particularly tragic about all of this legislation (the OSA and now this) is that there are obviously technical people in the room that would advise against this clusterfuck of a direction and they are being ignored by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control. This will continue to push people towards providers who operate outside UK jurisdiction or providers that care less about UK law and are less trustworthy.

I remain upset that they do this without building the necessary infra. They already assert identity when applying for a passport (and they do this very well). If they had extended this process by creating a OAuth compliant digital id provider first, then they could have avoided all the problems on the day the OSA dropped. Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting. Instead we have this status quo of encouraging UK citizens to hand over their identity documents to dubious third-parties or shifting their traffic from the UK externally to avoid these checks.

So effectively truly Private vpn providers have to have an exit from UK. I mean even if say proton says that its not meant for UK but "substantial" people use protonvpn because its private, then they would be forced for the same laws.

Another point is what prevents UK govt or UK bots to sign up for Proton Vpn say themselves and the difference between bots and humans is becoming thin especially for such Private Vpn's and then UK govt comes again knocking asking for age verification.

Honestly makes me feel like UK citizens are hostage in their own countries & we might see more UK IP's being blocked from accessing services because the idea of Virtual private network is still vague in my opinion. One can abstract a sort of VPN on top of xmpp or matrix servers too or even telegram as the intermediate. Would that mean that UK govt would come knocking onto these asking for who created the VPN (suppose I built a VPN which uses telegram to send messages/packets or uses telegram infra, so would they come to telegram asking what is the IP/detail info of my telegram user, would they go to signal or xmpp or matrix providers too? What if I use a provider who colo's on a datacenter and they go to the datacenter asking for access or the company behind datacenter

I am not saying that they would for something so niche but the fact of the matter is that nothing's stopping them from the laws from what I can gather.

They would only have to do it once to instill fear in the masses. I mean technically just this law has instilled fear and I am not even a UK citizen

Someone familiar with UK law please comment on my message but VPN is such a vague term imo. Like at this point you are just targeting private networks or people who meet online in private

VPNs LITERALLY means Virtual "PRIVATE NETWORKS"

What gives the govt right to intercept between two parties communicating in any way (enforcing a condition for one party to have Id of other for age verification etc.)