The government has now said it will not limit VPNs, citing evidence that relatively few children use them to bypass age checks.

But the proposal always seemed technically incoherent. Blocking commercial providers would not stop self-hosted WireGuard, OpenVPN, SSH tunnels, proxies, or traffic made to resemble ordinary HTTPS. Proper enforcement would mean invasive inspection at ISP level, with plenty of collateral damage for legitimate security and business use.

Was this a genuine policy option that collapsed once it met technical scrutiny, or was it mostly political signalling from the start?