VPN blocking

Often used by large organizations such as national governments or corporations, it can act as a tool for computer security or Internet censorship by preventing the use of VPNs to bypass network firewall systems.

Ports that are used by common VPN tunneling protocols, such as PPTP or L2TP, to establish their connections and transfer data can be closed by system administrators to prevent their use on certain networks.

[8] The government of Iran began blocking access to non-government sanctioned VPNs in March 2013,[9] a few months prior to the 2013 elections, to "prosecute users who are violating state laws" and "take offenders to national courts under supervision of judiciary service".

[11][12] It is unclear exactly how Russia plans to implement the regulation; though it seems like both the Federal Security Service (FSB) and ISPs will be tasked with identifying and cracking down on VPNs.

VPN usage is only banned when attempting to access sites already blocked by Roskomnadzor or Russia's governing body for telecommunications and mass media communications.

[16] The government of Syria activated deep packet inspection after the uprising in 2011 in order to block VPN connections.

In an attempt to curb the use of social media by its citizens, the government of Turkey has considered the complete ban of VPN apps.

The CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings made a comment in 2016 about the VPN market as a whole; “It’s a very small but quite vocal minority.

"[26] Meta's Threads platform started blocking users from the European Union who used VPNs to bypass the access restriction to the service stemming from the privacy concerns of the app.