It's either that or I just consider the internet dead and move on. It's nothing like it was 20 years ago anyway. There are other things to do. Many books to read and places to go. We had something really cool and we were lucky to experience it while it lasted, but it's gone now.

-- John Gilmore (probably https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/)

If the government blocks Mullvad then I’ll just switch to Wireguard on a Helsinki based VPS via Hetzner.

VPNs are trivial to ban, the IP space is well known, Wireguard is easily to fingerprint and block.

It will be a cat and mouse game, if the government looses this they'll simply make it illegal to be caught using a VPN including Tor. Which is on the table.

The only way this changes is a less crap party, but almost all including Reform are in favour of more censorship.

The current UK government don't actually care about children, if they did then they would actually investigate the child SA gangs, or holding people to account on the Epstein lists. We have seen other countries such as Australia [1] "magically" have the same idea at the same time, so this is likely a global group influencing this push.

> The current proposal to ban people under 16 - who also have the rights to freedom of expression and privacy - from some (as yet not fully delineated) social media services is likely to result in wide-spread verification.

This is the real objective, it will be just like the UK porn verification [2]. To express yourself online, you will soon need to associate your activity with your real identity. With the discussion of clamping down on VPNs, it won't be long before you need to verify your ID just to connect to the internet.

This has been a long time coming. Years ago you could buy a sim card with money already on it, use it, and then throw it away. Now you need to associate some credit card or ID with the sim card and perform some verification process.

> And so, for the first time, I am considering locating something (perhaps a WireGuard node, or a SOCKS proxy, or a recursive DNS server / DNS proxy, or perhaps all of them) somewhere on the Internet outside the UK, so that I can route some traffic through that, as needed, to maintain my access to the web.

It won't be enough. At some point the UK government will just mandate that they should be allowed to perform deep packet inspection, and then there will be nowhere left to hide. These changes are also being rolled out everywhere - which Country do you trust to run your data through?

I remember the New Zealand Christchurch attack on a mosque, and how multiple governments around the world pressured Facebook to remove it entirely [3]. They were more worried about people seeing and sharing the attack, than the attack itself. The manifesto was entirely banned [4], and people were left entirely dependent on the state to convey a narrative about the attack.

I have a feeling that this all fell out of the "Christchurch Call" [5]. I don't think this recent push spearheaded by them, but I believe it had a large influence on the efforts now ongoing.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo

[2] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/a...

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47620519

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/24/censor-bans-ma...

[5] https://www.christchurchcall.org/

"who also have the rights to freedom of expression and privacy", plenty of outlets for people to be expressive in the UK (more so than in the US for example, where the right wing will obviously attack any social media restrictions) that don't involve being fed junk divisive content from mainly US tech companies.

Privacy != anonymity.

Feel free to route your traffic via Wireguard. As long as it is not setup as a service for the mass evasion of age gates by children.