Denmark: Don’t Ban VPNs to Protect Rights Holders

Techradar and The Register report that the Danish government is considering a ban on VPN access to illegal content streams (PDF in Danish).

Denmark, while one of the primary culprits behind heavy-handed anti-privacy and -security legislative pushes, is far from the only country guilty of contributing to a trend that’s being drastically under-reported in European mainstream media. Namely, the willingness to sabotage the availability of privacy-enhancing technologies such as end-to-end encryption. The recent successful Danish push to ram a revised Chat Control regulation (third time’s a charm after two failures) through the European Council, was apparently only the start of a series of measures designed

There’s an increasing acceptance in many circles in otherwise liberal democratic European states that violating citizens’ fundamental right to safe, secure, and confidential online conversation is necessary to protect {children, IP holders, insert other stakeholder population of choice} from {terrorism, child sexual abuse materials, piracy, money laundering, narcotrafficking, insert criminal activity here}. Britain’s House of Lords is currently proposing amendments to a child protection bill that would ban VPN access by children, a Spanish judge ruled that Spain’s La Liga football association could block wide ranges of Cloudflare IP addresses during key games in order to stop suspected unlicensed streams, French broadcasters have successfully sued to force VPN providers to block pirate sports streams, the list goes on.

The tradeoff is a terrible, dangerous one. It condones lazy policing, rent-seeking, and the potential for horrendous human rights abuses even by well-meaning governments at the expense of citizens’ ability to anonymously access content that somebody will find objectionable – whether that is for moral, ethical, political, philosophical, legal, or commercial reasons.

Without commenting on the ethics, legality, or commercial aspects of pirated content, there will always be illegal information on the Internet – just like there will always be crime, drugs, accidents, and other negative aspects of society. The key is to reduce harm as much as possible, not to seek an illusory and unattainable elimination of any of these behaviours or phenomena while incurring much greater societal cost.

Banning VPNs helps intellectual property holders – but it won’t stop illegal streams, and any technological methods that could conceivably block illegal content would have far-reaching impact on legitimate online activity that, frankly, is nobody’s business but your own.

The question thus comes down to, can we as a society accept putting all citizens’ privacy and ability to browse securely at risk as a cost of corporate welfare for a few IP owners? Is that not the very definition of rent-seeking corruption?