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Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried
(www.techradar.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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How do you "ban VPNs"? That's not how software works, and VPNs are... you know, a key part of a bunch of online infrastructure. I get that they mean "ban them to bypass restrictions", but the entire point of a VPN is you can't tell from the outside what it's being used for. You may as well ban thinking about butterflies. You can write it down, but you can't enforce it.
They'll do what Russia does with their online services. Have a registration scheme with noncompliant VPNs being outright banned.
Simple when you know which dictator to copy.
I guess that works for VPN services offering servers outside the country. That's not what VPNs are, though, and you still can't ban the concept of VPNs having a connection outside the country. VPN software is available open source and all it takes for it to connect abroad is my phone with a VPN connection to my home computer being abroad.
I mean, Russia (and even China) still have people using VPNs all over the place. This (and a lot of the push for age verification and comms backdoors) reeks of barely understanding the desired result and entirely misunderstanding how the tech works.
I believe China does statistical analysis to do stuff like detecting and blocking VPNs, suspicious looking ssh traffic, etc from home Internet connections not going to an approved business. It's my understanding it's very hard to get around the GFW at the moment, and pretty complex stuff is needed to mask VPN traffic to make it look normal (Project X, Xray, Reality, etc).
Yeah, I read about some of the tightening at the time and I'm not disputing that there are technical ways of... you know, making your country's Internet a mostly separate bubble for non-techie users.
The point is it's both hard and extremely invasive to get there. You can't just wish upon a star for VPNs to not be used for a particular application without going to those extremes. Especially if the thing you're trying to prevent is people watching Superman two weeks early or wanking to a mainstream porn page.
They just block encrypted connections out of Russia to unknown servers