

If the UK is serious about blocking VPNs that don’t comply they’ll mostly succeed for the big ones. They’ll get them removed from app stores which will prevent most normies from finding and using them. They’ll apply network blocks to their entrance IP addresses (laughably easy, there are commercial vendors who sell data like this so they don’t even need to invent the wheel here) and make it difficult. They wouldn’t be able to prevent truly determined VPN providers from providing service but the days of $4/month for privacy/torrenting would be gone as the prices would likely be higher and you’d have to do things like mail cash.
Beyond the known IPs, VPN traffic is fairly easy to flag with DPI solutions and could be detected and blocked or dropped by ISPs acting under the law. This could also be used to stop people running tunnels to hosted VPS solutions outside of the country or run by friends from their homes. There are obviously ways around these, disguising traffic, various techniques but for most people they’d give up and either stop browsing porn or cough up their ID. Of course this would create a dangerous state of affairs where anyone using a VPN without being KYC’ed is clearly a criminal, at the very least a suspected video pirate, at the most a dangerous child predator or terrorist.
Additionally the UK isn’t like Russia or China, lots of western CEOs and employees pass through and within its jurisdictions and if a particular VPN is providing service without this they could try and arrest c-suite people or engineering staff associated with it and slam them with jail time. So that’s a problem.
Okay you say this but these tools are privately owned. What happens when one day the provider slams them with a 1000% price increase? They can either pay or go back to doctors who detect cancer even worse. It gives these AI companies undue influence and turns a tool into a crutch and an addiction which can be leveraged to drive up healthcare costs and punish providers who don’t play ball perhaps resulting in deaths from doctors in systems that don’t have access to the tool because they’re in a payment dispute with it or they had it but stopped paying for it and patients may not know any of this.
This is a nightmare for human beings who have fought hard to grow smart, to be intelligent as a species and to have educated professionals who have learned to use their brains be instead trained by these machines to stop using their brains, to atrophy them, to become dependent on these systems and worse than before the moment they are removed.
It will be used to attack the wages of doctors and I guarantee that they won’t be compensated with cheaper schooling (doctors need at least 6 years of university plus additional years in training before being able to practice on their own, it’s an immense expense and burden in a time of rising costs and huge debt). Which will lead to shortages of doctors and they’ll be replaced with AI and nurses not up to the task and we’ll be told this is fine. Having access to a thinking human being may become a gated luxury that few insurance companies want to shell out for until after you’ve been evaluated by AI systems several times and only IF those systems deem it necessary. Some AI systems will make mistakes that kill patients and insurance companies will be fine with this as a quickly dead patient is usually cheaper than paying for months or years of treatments and/or surgeries so they’ll have a perverse incentive to push patients towards those systems. Doctors take an oath not to do harm, not all take that as seriously as they should but usually there’s some compassion there whereas a computer system would not care one bit if you’re denied and unlike a doctor won’t fight for you against the insurance companies.