UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

This is one of dozens of amendments proposed by members, so it's more accurate to say "three members of the House of Lords attempting to ban the use of VPNs".

Blacklists are an inherently terrible, rights infringing approach to this sort of issue vs whitelists. It would be a lot better if the internet by default was simply considered 18+ (or 16+ or whatever a country wants). Instead, the tld system could be easily used to have age based domains where anyone who wanted one had to meet some set of requirements for content standards, accountability and content vetting, didn't allow user contributed content at all without review or whatever was needed.

At that point all the technical components exist to make this an ultra easy UI for parents. Require ISP WiFi routers at least to support VLANs and PPSKs, which ultra cheap gear can do nowadays no problem, and have an easy to GUI to "generate child password, restrict to [age bracket]", heck to even just put in a birthday and by default have it auto-increment access if a parent wants. Add some easy options for time-of-day restrictions etc, done. Now parents are in charge and no adult needs anything ever.

Now I highly doubt politicians are all being honest about full motivations here, clearly there are plenty of forces trying to use this issue as a wedge to go after rights in general. But at the same time parental concern is real, and non-technical people find it overwhelming. It'd be good if industries and community could proactively offer a working solution, that'd reduce the political salience a great deal. It's unfortunate the entire narrative has been allowed to go 100% backwards in approach.

It's so organic and grass roots and good for democracy™ that every single Western country suddenly decided that eliminating privacy online in lockstep was the top priority despite none of the ruling parties running on it as a platform or with any meaningful referendums from the voting public. But to what end?

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Yes. The problem is the pseudo anonymous internet makes it harder to control the population :/