2025 appears to be a year of change for the internet. While the government is not insisting that citizens have to upload their ID to access adult sites (a ticking time bomb of data leaks waiting to explode), it is insisting that they access all social media content from the past five years before issuing a visa. Well, it looks like Denmark didn’t want to miss out on all the drama. Because they announced plans to ban VPNs, then quickly backtracked shortly after.
The bill, proposed by Denmark’s Ministry of Culture, comes from a slightly different angle than other countries that restrict internet freedom and VPN access. The logic here is that VPNs should be banned because they threaten copyright laws by making it easier to access content that shouldn’t be available, rather than claiming this is a measure to protect children or catch criminals. “Can someone please think of a company?”
For example, they are concerned about people using VPNs to access Netflix libraries in other countries. It’s understandable that companies (and by extension governments) are concerned about this, but banning VPNs based on this is a step too far. NordVPN, Proton VPN, surf shark, cyber ghostor ExpressVPN It’s not just a cover for cyber pirates.
Aside from entertainment, banning VPNs also takes away Danes’ privacy. Google, Meta, X, and countless other companies are siphoning off all sorts of data from Internet users, and that data has ballooned to the size of a grotesquely enlarged tick. Because what they extract is essentially that person’s entire life. It’s no wonder that some people want to use a VPN to protect themselves from such problems.
Additionally, there’s the fact that VPNs play an important role in protecting people from cybersecurity threats on public WiFi networks. Without a VPN, you risk losing your login information or installing malware on your phone. This is so problematic that the French government recently encouraged people to use a VPN whenever they connect to free WiFi.
Fortunately, Denmark’s Minister of Culture, Jakob Engel Schmidt, seems to have reversed course here, making it clear that he did not want to imply that a ban on VPNs would be introduced. It’s hard to know for sure whether this was a miscommunication or a hasty course correction, but either way, it’s good news.
But it was only recently that Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard said: “We have to break away from the completely false perception that communicating via encrypted messaging services is a civil liberty for everyone.” This anti-privacy statement is very worrying and is consistent with the idea of banning VPNs. I hope that’s the end of it, but I think if I lived in Denmark right now, I would be very privacy conscious.
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