Eh, a back bencher has called for a report on how VPNs interfere with ofcoms ability to enforce/regulate the online safety act within 6 months.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vpns-online-safety-bill-labour-champion-b2239810.html
"My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.
"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems."
The likely conclusion of that report is that "VPNs circumvent the age verification requirement, so circumvent the OSA, so VPNs must be banned"
The only other solutions to "VPNs circumvent OSA" are:
Licence/regulate VPN usage (which is essentially a ban WRT the OSA).
Extremely difficult to do. It's fairly trivial to just tunnel your connection over SSH to a VPS in another country.
Also fairly trivial to get a VPN that tunnels over a websocket, making the traffic identical to website traffic.
The government is going to play cat&mouse with decades of legitimate infosec.
Do something progressive, and drop the OSA (which isn't going to happen).
They've literally just implemented these laws. It's not getting repealed.
They are going to make consumer use of anything that changes the public source address of a packet illegal.
How they enforce that, I dunno.
Like the whole OSA, it seems really poorly thought out. I dunno how they completely overlooked VPN usage