Government Set to Restrict UK Children’s Use of Internet VPNs and Social Media UPDATE
The UK Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, has today proposed last minute amendments to two Bills that will enable the Government to set a minimum age limit for social media (i.e. greater use of Age Verification), as well as options to age restrict or limit children’s use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN), where it “undermines safety protections and changing the age of digital consent“.
As regular readers will already know, the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) – a product of both the past and present governments – already includes a requirement for “highly effective” Age Verification. The original goal of this was to restrict the ability of children to access “harmful” adult content, such as porn, although political mission creep has inevitably started to cast a wider net and introduce ever more expansion censorship.
The latest proposals include plans to amend both the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill (CWSB) and the Crime and Policing Bill (CPB), both of which are already nearing the end of their debate cycle before achieving royal assent to become law.
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However, the proposed changes will first need to be guided by a new Children’s Digital Wellbeing Consultation, which is due to “launch next month” and will be “guided by what parents and children say they need now, not in several years’ time“. On the other hand, today’s announcement does rather make it sound like the Government has already made up its mind on the key issues.
The Government said “these powers will mean we can act fast on its findings within months, rather than waiting years for new primary legislation every time technology evolves … no platform gets a free pass“.
Key Changes Being Proposed
➤ A “crackdown on vile illegal content created by AI“. The government will shut a legal loophole and force all AI chatbot providers to abide by illegal content duties in the Online Safety Act or face the consequences of breaking the law.
➤ Setting a minimum age limit for social media.
➤ Restricting features like infinite scrolling that are deemed harmful.
➤ The government will also consult on how best to ensure tech companies can safeguard children from sending or receiving nude images in the first place.
➤ The government will “examine … options” to age restrict or limit children’s VPN use where it undermines safety protections and changing the age of digital consent.
➤ Strengthen protections for families facing the most devastating circumstances by ensuring that vital data following a child’s death is preserved before it can be deleted, except in cases where online activity is clearly not relevant to the death.
The key details around some of this are currently unclear. For example, we don’t yet know what sort of minimum age limit will be set (under 18s, under 16s etc.) or whether the government’s definition of “social media” extends beyond the major platforms (Facebook, X etc.), which might cause it to reach into other user-to-user services (e.g. small community forums about general topics that don’t appeal to children, help forums for sensitive subjects, chat systems inside online video games etc.). Suffice to say that there are a variety of technical, privacy, ethical and economic challenges, particularly for the smallest of websites that may lack the capability to adapt.
UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, said:
“As a dad of two teenagers, I know the challenges and the worries that parents face making sure their kids are safe online.
Technology is moving really fast, and the law has got to keep up. With my government, Britain will be a leader not a follower when it comes to online safety.
The action we took on Grok sent a clear message that no platform gets a free pass.
Today we are closing loopholes that put children at risk, and laying the groundwork for further action.
We are acting to protect children’s wellbeing and help parents to navigate the minefield of social media.”
However, despite the focus on children above, it’s important for adult users to understand that wider use of Age Verification will directly impact their own use of and access to such services, potentially preventing your access until such time as you agree to share your personal biometric or financial data with often unknown, unfamiliar and unregulated third-party organisations. The above remarks are particularly relevant when you consider that it may be mostly adults driving VPN usage to bypass age verification in order to avoid sharing their personal data with unknown entities.
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All of this is before we touch on the potentially far-reaching and unintended consequences of enforcing age verification on VPNs, which are also legitimate tools for businesses, journalists and to help protect people (security) when abroad or on public networks etc. Many such VPNs can be deeply integrated into modern protection and network optimisation systems, often acting seamlessly in the background, thus a blanket requirement risks being extraordinarily disruptive.
The reality is that, whatever the government decides, children who go seeking access to such systems and content will always find a way to circumvent any measures that are introduced – just as they always have done (e.g. people can create their own personal VPNs with ease). Instead, it often ends up being the innocent and harmless online services and security systems that could be hurt the most by the sledgehammer approach to age-gated internet censorship.
Finally, big questions also remain over how the government will go about awkward business of ensuring tech companies can safeguard children from even sending or receiving nude images in the first place, which could be difficult as many people these days use private messaging apps based around end-to-end encryption.
Please note that we won’t be able to approve any comments on this news article that appear to directly promote specific VPN services, due to the risk that this could clash with the government’s prior warnings about such promotions (here).
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UPDATE 1st March 2026
The related consultation has now launched (here).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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As a dad of two teenagers Keir Starmer should know that his children do not have any devices that he did not give them. Starmer should take responsibility for parenting his teenagers by installing highly effective parental controls on his children’s devices. These are easy to use and cannot be bypassed as long as the parent does not give their child the pass codes.
The government cannot be this stupid. They must know none of what they are doing will work, and not only will not work will be highly damaging to the privacy and safety of adults and children online. No wonder so many people suspect an ulterior motive! Government spyware is coming to private messaging – how convenient.
The flip side is that a lot of parents are basically stupid/clueless….
Maybe but there’s no reason internet access should be treated any differently to other potentially harmful things kept in the home. If parents were allowing their children to freely drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes or otherwise neglect their children’s health then social services would be getting involved. “I don’t want to learn how to keep my children safe” would not be accepted as an excuse in any other situation.
Excellent in principle but I don’t think enforcing it will be very easy at all.
I see the blatant lies and misinformation out there, pure hate that has no place in a child’s life.
I’m glad the government are stepping in to help but it’s parents that should be the first line of defense.
On this issue I’m more than happy to be overreaching and safeguard my children from the cesspit that is the social media space.
I’m at an age where I can run rings around my kids concerning internet and technology in general so they won’t be able to fool me.
The usual crowd will say it’s government overreach but if parents actually parented the government wouldn’t need to step in and do it for them
The comments on the consultation are going to be worth a read, though many may well express their opion in public.
If implemented, this might put an end to Labour’s proposal to give 16 year olds the vote. 🙂
I think everyone should be concerned that they are making provisions in the Act that allow the government to bypass primary legislation in the future. Depending on the wording, it allows this and future governments to potentially introduce new restrictions and requirements at will. It’s a dangerous power to leave unchecked, especially when nobody knows who will form the next government, or what they will stand for.
Yep, similar tactics have been used to ban Apple’s encrypted file storage under powers granted by RIPA. All using secret orders and secret courts. It’s beyond belief in a so-called democracy. Politicians won’t even answer questions about it and the media let them get away with it.
The one thing I wish the government would take action about are AI videos on video Streaming sites peddling lies, often using images of news presenters and other well known people.
Maybe that’s what the government want so you go back to traditional Media and get what the approve
This govt is pure evil. All they think about is banning and taxing. Keir Stalin really wants to break the record for highest disapproval rating in any country ever
The next election can’t come soon enough. Labour needs zero seats
Good – seeing my neighbours 11 and 12yr old all on tiktok and trying to do stupid challenges is painful. Social Media broke society imho (and I am 71 so remember the good old days)
What else do you see your neighbours doing 11 and 12yr that you would like to control as well? These will come to control you too, what comes around goes around.
A consultation, which is “guided by what parents and children say they need now, not in several years’ time“ to dictate what the whole tech industry must do is very clueless and it will cause lots of harm.
Also, what are they going to do with services like tor?
And when they introduce the age restrictions for VPNs, service providers will start selling not VPNs, but proxies and they are back in square one, except for the damage they caused.
This is clearly just path of total control how you consume internet, because everyone will have to register and identify and each of your click will be registered and fed into AI which will correlate all the little data and tell government officials everything and anything since they already have powers to monitor all your internet activity just it was harder to map to exact identities..
They will ban social media to learn the strange world we live in, but will allow to mutilate and change sex from 9 without involving parents..
Hard left is now knocking on your door, what you going to do?
Starmer hard left? The Overton window is centred on the whole population not you.
As mentioned in the article, previous governments have been attempting to limit children’s access to ‘harmful’ content for years. It’s a difficult thing to achieve. Do you think they shouldn’t try?
Best way to protect kids of course it to put eletric sheep fence around them and then take no other reasoned responsibility in balancing freedoms and responsibilities..
Ah yes, 9 year olds are getting sex changes. Except they aren’t. None of that is true.
Even adults can’t get that sort of treatment without spending 10 years on a waiting list and dancing like a puppet to satisfy the whims of the government.
Maybe consider getting your information from somewhere other than GBNews?
China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Belarus
The above are countries with restricted VPN usage. Labour wants to join this list of prestiged countries
Some VPNs have ways of getting around government restrictions even in places like Russia or China unless there’s a complete internet shutdown like in Iran.
Doesn’t take long for the left and right in politics to come to the fore in the ISPreview comments section. 🙂
“the children” is such a weak excuse to make insanely authoritarian policies seem palatable, even defended by the ignorant
The only way to know which user is a kid is to put KYC in place. Now the govt has a database of potential dissidents
Iran has shut down its internet to supress the population. Surely the labour elites are foaming at the thought of enacting that power. It is no coincidence governments around the world are making insane pushes at the same time: Sharing news is banned in Canada and australia, now in the Netherlands building wealth is essentially banned too, Portugal is enacting digital id for the internet too. Each country is a testbed, only a matter of time until all measures are mutualy adopted and the only solution will be to move out
I’m a bit torn on this. Social Media is now proven to be dangerous for under 18yo, but this censorship won’t end there.
Ideally this would be left to sensible parents, but it seems they are in short supply too.
We need BT/EE, VF3 and VMO2 to at least offer parents good choices to limit social media and VPN access.
It occurs to me that (for mobile phones or other complete devices) parental controls / access to VPN apps etc. should be enabled by default at the time of manufacture or distribution. To disable those controls would be the responsibility of the purchaser – e.g. the parents under supervision – as appropriate.
Of course that wouldn’t work!
Self build devices could not be covered in this manner too. And there will also be the clever so-and-so’s who know how to do those things and sell them to the kids.
I’m a bit torn on this. Social Media is now proven to be dangerous for under 18yo, but this censorship won’t end there.
Ideally this would be left to sensible parents, but it seems they are in short supply too.
We need BT/EE, VF3 and VMO2 to at least offer parents good choices to limit social media and VPN access.
What if I installed Wireguard on my children laptops, tables and mobiles so they can bypass geo restrictions and watch HBO, SkyShowtime, Canal+ while in the UK and BBC while they are outside of UK?
They don’t watch pornography but just in case I block it on DNS level (I know, same stupid as govt regulations)
Once the government assumes ID based VPN control, you simply won’t be able to use one similar like many other things get controlled. Initially it might not be perfect, but technically there is no reason why it would not be possible to eventually to seal it pretty well.
How is that Bob? Will govt block the ability to install VPN from .apk?
The Labour government has taken the fall for all the far-right policies that Reform would implement. Setting this country up for failure at the next election.
State control and invasion of privacy is all this is. The internet has always been adult by default, children cannot buy an internet connection.
We have one last chance to save this country, or it’s time to jump ship. What a disgrace.
This is a ridiculous comment. When did Nigel Farage said he wanted to block the internet? If anything he said the polar opposite
@John
Because a party like that is only interested in themselves, they want control, power and wealth. They only object to anything to increase their public support, they use hate as a vehicle to push their agenda, pretending they care about citizens.
They would love nothing more than complete control over what you do on the internet. They dont want you having ideas of freedom. They want you uneducated and under the thumb.
You just described the labour party, not anything coming out of Reform
The politician who suggest the internet safety bill actually currently is a member of Reform.
Yet more gigantic overreach by of far left govenment.
There’s no such thing as a ‘children’s’ vpn. They want to monitor and control you.
Also far right goverments who bring you a grok of errr stuff, untruth social as well as instawhatsit and so on.
Labour is a right leaning party now.
They havent been remotely left since Corbyn.
I predict this will result in sales of preconfigured MiFi sized VPN enables mini router devices from abroad.
Just configure a device SSID into your phone, use a web browser to configure some WiFi details and default country into the VPN device, and off you go. As soon as ISP’s block one VPN endpoint another will be set up.
You might live in the internet-wonder age where anything is possible with the internet. The reality is that all internet is just IPs and ports that can be decrypted and inspected if government wants. Restrict, record and have every click available in those massive new datacentres being built..
BGP RPKI, DNSSEC, firewall, deep packet inspection, SSL decryption, client side, server side.. etc..
‘The reality is that all internet is just IPs and ports that can be decrypted and inspected if government wants.’
Elaborate please. Outside a VPN IP and port can certainly be intercepted in transit but encrypted payload cannot right now. Metadata is definitely useful but there’s no evidence anyone is able to decrypt even relatively weakly encrypted traffic. This is why the powers that be try and get at data from either side of the connection.
Mass surveillance is absolutely a thing but best to keep it in context. Assume government are trivially able to find out what you visit and who you talk with, they don’t know exactly what you’re doing when you visit or the content of the conversations. Probably pretty easy to piece it together but not directly visible.
I think you are missing the point. VPNs will be blocked unless you verify your ID and allow to track stuff on VPN provider side who will supply all info to the government and make VPN pointless except few cases.
I apologise if this sounds like it’s coming from a conspiracy theorist, but this government is arguably authoritarian at this point. Since Labour has been in power, the OSA has come into law shutting independent websites down and forcing invasive age verification checks, the DWP now has permission to look into the bank accounts of certain people claiming benefits and now we have measures like this which will ultimately censor people more.
I think this was before Labour but we’ve also seen restrictions on things like disruptive protests too. The UK is going at an alarming rate to censor a lot of stuff.
Those laws already were passed under Tories, but didn’t go in effect til the ruling party changed.
One of the people involved in the planning of those laws under Tories is now a member of Reform.
what a nanny state.
There has been a suggestion that setting up your own VPN could provide privacy and security benefits. While this is technically feasible, it’s important to understand the limitations of this approach. When you run your own VPN server, it becomes significantly easier for authorities or third parties to identify who is behind the VPN, as the server can be directly traced back to you as the owner and operator.
That said, there is a potential jurisdictional consideration: if you set up the VPN server outside the UK, UK jurisdiction may not apply to that server or its operations. However, this doesn’t necessarily provide complete protection, as international cooperation agreements and other legal mechanisms may still come into play. Before pursuing this route, it’s worth carefully considering both the technical and legal implications of running your own VPN infrastructure
Yep using any kind of VPN is riddled with risks. You are essentially giving the provider the same level of access to your internet traffic as you give to your ISP, often more as you often need to install their app which may be closed source and potentially up to no good (which has been shown to be the case in the past).
I think in the case where, prior to the censorship laws, you would have just accessed certain sites using your internet connection then a self-hosted VPN is fine. You are not trying to hide that you visited the site but simply avoiding having to give that site identity documents – definitely the primary use case, I believe. If you are doing something you do want to hide e.g. sailing the high seas then absolutely do not use a self-hosted VPN – it can easily be tracked back to you.
In any case self-hosting will require payment, and payment by credit card is enough to verify your age. If you pay for your VPN with a credit card you will not need to give them any more information. So there’s not really anything to gain by self-hosting over using a reputable VPN provider.
The problem with this ‘VPN ban’ is that it will essentially eliminate free tiers being made available by reputable providers. This will push children and tightwad adults on to the disreputable providers who will have a field day exploiting them.
@john_r What about the Tor network? which functions similarly to a VPN service as is used to bypass censorship, through its 3 hop onion routing protocol since essentially all of the nodes are volunteers.
It’s quite easy to set up as well considering it only requires installing a browser for most users, I think the reason why most people prefer VPNs is because they’re less limited by cloudflare as Tor is generally used for DDOS attacks and other malicious purposes along with the fact the speeds are quite slow and dependant on the circuit.
Dear parent and ofspring, rights have responsibilities, why do you think you should have the rights if you can’t / don’t deliver the responsibilities ?
Yet another failing to tackle the (underlying) problem while faffing around with symptoms of human depravity and corporate morals, rather like the morals of some / many parents. Prattling about about with micro rules rather than principles.
Police state by not so much stealth, sad UK.
We have multiple generations who grew up being able to look at pr0n on the internet and chat on forums/chat rooms/social networking. Now all of a sudden, its bad for children and needs to be banned (whilst also effectively banning it for many adults like myself).
What is so much worse about all this stuff now compared to 20 years ago?
The only thing that’s worse is that AI is becoming more prevalent. Also Gen Alpha kids are becoming increasingly uneducated and addicted to the Internet because it’s all they know. We grew up with this, yes. But we also didn’t have social media 20-30 years ago. At least, not as popular within society. We still went to school, went outside, hung out with friends. Kids now dont do that.
Most importantly, the government have always wanted to control the Internet. Its just that none of them bothered to push hard enough. Until Kier Stalin came along.
Digital ID by the backdoor. It is so obvious however the childless dictators will suddenly believe somehow children benefit from this. Especially insane considering they can’t get information from the internet but somehow they are allowed to vote
So presumably they are going to instruct ISPs to block the IP addresses of popular commercial VPNs unless those VPNs require users to provide a passport or similar and a live video to prove the person is human. This will be challenging either for the free VPNs or the ones that do not require a login. It will also make those providers even more of a target for hackers to get hold of the passport scans and videos.
Tourists are going to have a problem using their VPNs when they come on holiday to the UK.
If they draft the legislation badly, they could also bring in site-to-site VPNs (used in company offices) and corporate VPN clients (used when working remotely) – it’s not impossible that someone under 18 could be working for such a company.
As for social media – teenagers will just find a foreign site that doesn’t impose restrictions and keep moving as the Government bans them. Also, all the teenagers would need to do is get their parents to set up an account with their ID.
The irony is that the Government (a previous Government, and the minister responsible for the OSA defected to another party who objects to the OSA) consulted with the American big tech companies for the OSA, now they’re saying the big tech companies are bad.
Thank god we have a government deeply concerned about what wrongthink our kids get up to on the interwebs
Shame they didn’t care when grooming gangs were doing unspeakable things to them. Long live comrade secretary Starmlin. Power to the party