My ISP Virgin Media is blocking VPNs via Parental Controls

The new internet provider has connected me up, and boy is it fast. I ordered 1GB and am currently getting ~800 Mbps down. I cannot complain too much about that, especially when our ISPs in the UK have a disclaimer in their small print which says something along the lines of: You are paying for 1GB but in reality, we can only guarantee you will get 350 Mbps on average. I’m very lucky to be getting that speed to be honest. My previous provider was also 1GB but I averaged about 400-500 Mbps on good days.

I’m still stabilising — they do say it takes a couple of days for it to “settle in”, something the engineer also reminded me of on install day. Naturally, I’ve been catching up and playing around, and…failing miserably at updating my Proton VPN.

Hmm! Very strange. I update my Linux system via the terminal and all other updates were downloading and installing without issue. Only Proton. It would timeout when trying to check for any updates on https://repo.protonvpn.com/debian. Huh, I thought I would never see Proton unavailable! Man, the world really is going to pot! That was my initial thought, thinking Proton was going the way of GitHub and Cloudflare with all their recent outages.

I then fired up their VPN and that worked, at least. With it still connected I thought to give the update another go. It immediately connected and updated at the first attempt. What on earth was happening here?

My new ISP!

They automatically enable Parental Controls and now it would seem that VPNs are bundled along with all the other block lists. Of course, no one can verify what exactly the block lists contain but that is highly annoying.

Only in the UK, mate.

Right-o! I logged-on to my account and disabled the entire Parental Controls option. I then made sure that the actual VPN was off, and attempted to ping the Proton repo. That worked straight away without any timeouts this time.

So, I’m right. The world really is going to pot. I’m not too sure who decided that VPNs are not for kids and whether this is Virgin Media-only thing or not. But it sets me off down the path of thinking that all those conspiracy theories doing the rounds in the UK are all true: the Government really does want to ban VPNs. I wish them luck.

This could just be Virgin Media trying to be helpful, but it does make me go “Hmm”.