Are VPNs Being Banned?

This page is part of the Proton VPN FAQ Hub.

Are VPNs being banned in the UK?

No. Are VPNs being banned in Britain, as several viral posts have insisted since the Online Safety Act took effect? No, and the government has now said so in Parliament. On 16 July 2026, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall confirmed that ministers would not age-gate or ban VPNs, and Online Safety Minister Kanishka Narayan put it more bluntly in a broadcast interview, saying the decision had been taken not to limit them. The reasoning was practical: VPNs have legitimate privacy and security uses, and the government’s own research found that around a quarter of 11 to 17 year olds had used one, mostly for reasons that had nothing to do with age checks.

That came after a genuine parliamentary attempt in the other direction. On 21 January 2026 the House of Lords voted 207 to 159 for an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill requiring the Secretary of State to prohibit supplying age-check-evading VPN services to under-18s. The government opposed it, the provision did not appear in the Act that received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026, and Proton VPN is not blocked in Britain today. Ofcom’s position throughout has been that its enforcement targets services which promote circumvention to children, not the people using VPNs, and it and the ICO were asked to report by October 2026 on how platforms might detect circumvention themselves.

What about the European Union?

The EU has been having a noisier version of the same argument without producing any proposal to ban VPNs. The Commission launched an age verification app in April 2026, Ursula von der Leyen set out plans for EU-wide age restrictions the following month, and Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen acknowledged that the app can be defeated with a VPN and that the issue would be picked up in future work. In May 2026 the Commission stated flatly that there was no crackdown on VPNs.

Individual member states have gone further in discussion than in law. Denmark tried to attach VPN restrictions to an anti-piracy package in December 2025, France has debated the point alongside its age verification rules, and a European Parliament research briefing in 2026 floated VPN measures as one option for protecting children online. A think-tank briefing is not a directive, a directive is not a national law, and none of these has produced an instrument that makes VPN use unlawful for an adult anywhere in the bloc.

Where are VPNs actually banned or licensed?

The genuinely restrictive countries have been restrictive for a decade or more, and the recent movement there has been incremental tightening rather than sudden prohibition. In nearly all of them the legal target is the provider: get a licence, agree to filter, or be blocked. Digital rights groups have tracked that tightening as part of a broader pattern of internet censorship rather than as VPN policy on its own.

The current picture, as of August 2026:

• China: VPN services require state approval and unapproved ones are blocked. This regime dates from a 2017 crackdown and has not loosened.
• Russia: a 2017 law forced VPN providers to connect to the state blocklist. Since 1 September 2025, individuals face administrative fines of 3,000 to 5,000 roubles for deliberately searching for listed extremist material, including over a VPN, and 50,000 to 80,000 roubles for advertising VPN services.
• Iran: unlicensed VPNs are prohibited and promoting them is an offence, though use is near universal in practice.
• Belarus: VPN and Tor traffic has been targeted for blocking since 2015.
• Turkmenistan: amongst the most comprehensive blockers anywhere, with VPN use treated as prohibited outright.
• Myanmar: the 2025 Cybersecurity Law, in force from 30 July 2025, carries one to six months imprisonment and fines for unauthorised VPN use, with claimed extraterritorial reach over Myanmar citizens abroad.
• United Arab Emirates: VPN use is not an offence in itself, but using a false IP address to commit or conceal a crime carries imprisonment and heavy fines under the 2021 cybercrime law.

The quieter risk is data retention, not prohibition

In a democracy, are VPNs being banned is probably the wrong question. If one ever does make VPNs unusable, the mechanism will probably not be a prohibition. It will be a logging requirement, because a no-logs VPN that is legally obliged to keep logs is no longer a no-logs VPN. India demonstrated this in 2022, when a CERT-In directive ordered providers to retain customer names, addresses, phone numbers and allocated IP addresses for five years, with prison time for non-compliance. Nobody was banned. The providers simply left.

Proton removed its physical servers from India and now serves Indian IP addresses by routing from Singapore, outside the reach of the directive, and several competitors did the same. The visible consequence for users was VPN apps quietly thinning out of Indian app stores. That is the pattern worth watching in any jurisdiction: retention mandates, mandatory licensing and app store pressure do the work that an outright ban would struggle to get through a parliament.

How to read VPN ban headlines without catastrophising

The reporting in this area is bad in both directions. Providers benefit commercially from the sense that privacy is about to become unavailable, and a parallel ecosystem of channels benefits from the sense that a ban is already secretly in place. The corrective is boring and effective, and it is the one BAIZAAR applies to every scare story in this category: check what stage the thing is actually at. A committee recommendation is not a bill. A bill is not an Act. A Lords amendment that the government opposes usually dies in the Commons, as the January 2026 VPN amendment did. A consultation is a request for opinions, not a law.

Meanwhile the tools remain available and using a VPN remains legal across the UK, the US and the EU, and the sensible response to legislative uncertainty is to use a provider whose jurisdiction and audit history you have actually checked rather than to stockpile panic. Proton VPN Plus on the two-year plan is Swiss-based, open source and independently audited, which is a more useful defence against future policy than any amount of speculation. This page is general information about a fast-moving policy area and is not legal advice.

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