Europe targets VPNs as ‘loophole’ in age verification laws

The European Parliamentary Research Service this week identified VPN services as a critical "loophole in legislation that needs closing" as governments across Europe and the US expand mandatory age verification for adult content.

However, what followed is the opposite: Downloads of VPN services soared by 1,800% in the UK following the passage of the Online Safety Act, with comparable rises of 1,150% in Florida and 967% in Utah due to platform regulation.

The regulation drive has arisen out of real fears over the safety of children. For example, the House of Lords passed legislation to prohibit VPN usage by those below 18 years. Utah is the first state in the US to address VPN usage through its legislation on age verification.

The EPRS paper acknowledges that current age-assurance methods are "relatively easy for minors to bypass" but offers no solution to VPN circumvention.

Deep packet inspection, the only reliable method to identify VPN signatures at the network level, requires ISP-level surveillance infrastructure that only authoritarian regimes currently deploy.

Democratic governments lack both the technical infrastructure and political appetite for such monitoring.

This gap became apparent in March when Utah's SB 73 attempted to define user location by physical presence "regardless of VPN use", language that sounds authoritative but has no technical enforcement mechanism.

Europe's approach has already faltered on security grounds. In April, security consultant Paul Moore exposed critical flaws in the EU's own age-verification app: unencrypted facial images and biometric authentication bypassed by toggling a single configuration value.

The breach occurred despite European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's claims about "the highest privacy standards in the world".

Mozilla, Mullvad, and Proton issued a joint letter on May 5th opposing UK proposals to mandate age verification for VPN access, urging officials "not to undermine the open internet".

France's double-blind model shows a middle path: platforms learn only whether users meet age thresholds while verification providers see no site-visit data.