They don't want perfection. They want to move things forward, for their definition of forward.

If they ban bog standard VPNs and find out they're still being used, they'll punish the VPN companies.

If the VPN companies create workarounds and avoid the punishment, they'll punish the payment processors.

If the VPN companies start using esoteric workarounds and taking cryptocurrency for payment, then they've mostly won -- most people aren't going to deal with that shit.

All the while, they'll still go after the social media/etc companies for allowing circumvention of age-gating. So the social media companies will crack down on our ability to visit their sites with any sort of privacy.

My point: laws are all imperfect but can still have a huge effect. Pointing out work arounds doesn't change that.

For context, I'm really disturbed by the recent move to punish people seeking privacy instead of the social media companies that are enabling this social media shit. They know who the companies are, since that's who they're going to punish for not age gating. But they'd (I'm talking about US based age-gating pushes as well) rather fuck with our privacy and make our PII more susceptible to data breaches than tell the social media companies to eat shit.

Mullvad already does all of the things you mentioned. Cryptocurrency payments with no KYC, and many anti-censorship [1] methods. Moreover, their mobile and desktop apps apply heuristics to find combinations of anti-censorship measures that work automatically. It's very user friendly (all the user needs to do is press on connect). So, the blocking attempts are still pointless because large, prominent providers already make all these bypass methods very user friendly.

[1] https://mullvad.net/en/help/connecting-to-mullvad-vpn-from-r...