Age Verification Failed - Regulating VPNs Won't Fix It
TechTarget, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
Restricting VPNs confuses the symptom with the problem and threatens infrastructure businesses depend on.
Governments in Australia and the UK are looking beyond age verification toward the tools people use to bypass it, with proposals to detect and block VPNs.
Aloha Browser creator Andrew Frost Moroz argues this confuses symptom with problem, since a VPN connection does not reveal intent and a journalist, a remote worker, and someone dodging an age check look identical on the network.
With an estimated 1.7 billion VPN users worldwide, restrictions push people toward less transparent workarounds while setting a precedent that could reach encrypted messaging and cloud storage.
He argues privacy-preserving verification already exists, using a trusted intermediary that issues an untraceable token proving eligibility without identifying the user.