Digital Authoritarianism
Parliamentarians have recently been working on a new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, ostensibly designed to safeguard children in education.
It is therefore more than a little strange that discussion around the Bill has quickly turned to VPNs — a democratising technology primarily used to preserve individual privacy online and to circumvent censorship.
The excerpt below reveals proposals to make the use of a VPN contingent on age verification. This is not a minor technical adjustment. It fundamentally destroys the purpose of VPNs altogether. A VPN exists to decouple an individual’s online activity from their real-world identity. Requiring adults to identify themselves in order to use privacy-preserving technology renders that technology meaningless.
Age-gating VPNs does not simply “protect children”; it creates a permission-based internet where access to privacy is conditional on state-approved identification. Once normalised, this framework can be extended effortlessly: from age verification to identity verification, from safeguarding to surveillance, from optional controls to mandatory compliance. This is not speculation — it is a well-established pattern in authoritarian regulatory regimes.
The Libertarian Party UK is diametrically opposed to this latest Orwellian assault on the natural rights to privacy and freedom of expression. VPNs are not a threat to children; they are a threat to unchecked power. That is precisely why they are being targeted. Further detail on the LPUK’s Digital Freedoms policy can be found here:
The restriction of VPNs under the shameless pretext of “safeguarding children” marks the effective end of a free internet in the UK. A free internet is not defined by content moderation policies or government-approved platforms, but by the ability of individuals to communicate, associate, and access information without prior authorisation.
An unregulated internet has been one of the most powerful vehicles for liberty the world has ever seen. It has enabled dissidents to organise under repressive regimes, exposed corruption, undermined state propaganda, and allowed ordinary individuals to participate directly in public discourse for the first time in history.
These gains were not granted by governments; they were seized by people using tools that operated beyond state control.
That same decentralisation and anonymity is now being deliberately dismantled — not because it has failed, but because it has worked too well.
Welcome to Digital Authoritarianism.
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