The European Parliament has officially labelled VPNs a problem. A loophole. Something that needs closing.
The context: the EU is pushing mandatory age verification across the internet, and VPNs allow users to bypass those controls. The European Parliamentary Research Service has now recommended that VPN providers themselves be subjected to age verification requirements. England’s Children’s Commissioner has gone further, calling for VPN services to be restricted to adults only.
The official reason: child protection.
The actual effect: anyone who wants to use the internet anonymously must first identify themselves to the state.
The Pattern
What disturbs me is not the measure itself. It is how many otherwise reasonable, educated people not only defend this but actively present it as necessary.
Because the pattern is not new. It is always the same.
Step one: choose a target that no one can openly oppose. Child protection. Counter-terrorism. Hybrid threats. Disinformation. The enemy is always framed so that disagreement reads as moral failure.
Step two: introduce a measure that goes far beyond the stated goal. Mandatory age verification for VPNs will not protect a single child. It will, however, create an infrastructure in which anonymous internet use is effectively abolished for every citizen.
Step three: anyone who objects gets labelled an apologist or an extremist.
This is not paranoia. It is the observable mechanics of a system that accumulates control, incrementally, one justified exception at a time.
“Child Protection” as a Blank Cheque
Ten years ago, what the EU is now planning would have been described as a textbook authoritarian surveillance method, the kind of thing we criticised China and Russia for.
The difference between then and now is not the technology. It is the legitimation.
When Beijing forces its citizens to identify themselves before accessing the internet, that is authoritarianism. When Brussels does the same thing, it is called child protection.
And one should not forget: the EU has already launched its official age-verification app. Security researchers discovered shortly afterwards that it stores biometric data unencrypted and contains bypass vulnerabilities that make the verification itself circumventable. That is the level of competence driving this agenda.
What Follows
The EU will not self-correct. Institutions that accumulate power do not return it voluntarily. That is not a criticism of any individual. It is a sober observation of how political systems work.
What individuals can do is draw the right conclusions before the state draws them for you.
If you still believe that a European passport, a European bank account, and a European address are the natural habitat of a free person, it is worth asking yourself whether you will answer that question the same way in five years.
More money. More freedom. Less state.
That is not a slogan. It is a programme.
If you want to understand what a clean, legally and tax-efficient exit from the EU actually looks like in practice, get in touch. This is exactly what I work on every day.