The Danish government wants the public to weigh in on its proposed laws restricting use of VPNs to access certain corners of the internet.

Proposed amendments to the country’s laws on copyright and broadcasting would see VPNs limited for common uses under changes to combat access to illegal streaming services.

As per the current draft, the restriction would extend to all media content that would otherwise not be available in Denmark, as well as the use of VPNs to access blocked or illegal websites.

The document outlining the proposals did not mention how the government plans to implement this.

However, it stated that in whatever form the provision is made, it should be tech-neutral to account for future developments, and said the broad wording of the proposal was intentional so that objectionable technology in the future could also be dealt with under the same legislative amendments.

"The rules in their current form are not suitable for cracking down on, for example, illegal IPTV services or illegal use of VPN connections, because the rules are primarily aimed at illegal decoders and other decoding equipment," the document [PDF] reads (machine translated).

"Pirate decoders and pirate cards are out of date, and it is therefore necessary to update the rules so that they can handle today’s piracy activities. At the same time, the rules need to be future-proofed so that they are applicable in a rapidly evolving technical landscape."

Using VPNs to access geo-restricted content is rarely illegal worldwide. For example, using a VPN to watch US Netflix content from another country isn’t illegal, though it violates the platform’s terms of service.

In the UK, VPN use soared after the Online Safety Act (OSA) came into force as Brits tried to evade the newly mandated age verification checks for some platforms.

Although there were murmurs of a government-led VPN ban, politicians confirmed this was not in their plans, acknowledging the fact they have many legitimate uses.

Wider industry stakeholders also advised UK parliamentary committees that the OSA’s perceived lack of success, specifically owing to the efficacy of VPNs to bypass age and content blocks, was not necessarily caused by the availability of VPNs.

In the context of blocking young people from accessing harmful content, Dan Sexton, CTO at the Internet Watch Foundation, said the issue stems from the fact other countries have not blocked access to that material.

Other experts who previously spoke to The Register on the matter agreed VPNs are just tools young people use to exploit a loophole that should not exist, and when one closes, another is likely to open.

The consensus away from government seems to be that the onus should be on platforms to properly confirm the location of a user, instead of lawmakers restricting the use of legitimate, privacy-preserving tools like VPNs.

And while the Danes are not proposing an outright ban on VPNs, the government’s approach of targeting them – and any future tech solutions that could open up similar bypass mechanisms – was not received warmly.

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The Danish government could be seen as limiting the public’s freedoms because of its failure to adequately prevent illegal streaming websites from violating copyright laws in unreachable jurisdictions. Privacy activists, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Paige Collings, hold these kinds of views on the OSA, saying the new laws were more about censorship than safety.

She said a potential ban on VPNs to prevent bypasses of age assurance mechanisms represent "a terrifying effort to exercise authoritarian control on accessing information."

Denmark’s culture minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt dismissed local reports of a total VPN ban as "fake news."

"I do not advocate for criminalizing VPNs and will certainly not propose that," he Xeeted (machine translated). "In all modesty, this seems like a deliberate misunderstanding of a fairly modest bill, which solely establishes that it is illegal to stream sports without paying."

Broad public opposition to the VPN plans comes amid a tense political environment for tech regulation in Europe.

The European Union’s proposal for Chat Control remains one of the main policy talking points. The regulation attempts to break open encrypted messaging apps by forcing platforms to scan communications for harmful content using AI.

It is similar to the UK’s long-held ambition to break end-to-end encryption (E2EE), packaged using similar themes – disrupting child sexual abuse, tackling terrorism, and so on.

While the two policy proposals are distinct, Denmark was an ardent supporter of the wildly unpopular Chat Control regulations until Germany’s key opposing vote in October forced it to back off. The timing of the VPN consultation may elicit further unease about the country’s attitude toward privacy-preserving technologies. ®