I am also excited about this. I believe there is a small chance that this will result in us getting a bit of the 'old internet' pre-eternal September back.

I would love to go back to an internet that's harder to access, with a higher ratio of noobs to more experienced technology users. Everything was so much more fun back then.

I have in fact begun to resent the internet over the last 10 years or so...and my usage has dropped to like one or two websites that could be called communities. This being one of them.

The rest is now purely utilitarian. Online banking and courses.

How do you figure? Doesn't matter if you're connecting via VPN or Tor if what you're connecting to has been scrubbed by these inane regulations.

Unless you're expecting the whole internet to go all rebel pirate underground, which seems... implausible.

I expect companies to migrate to saner regulatory environments and geofilter the EU. VPN/Tor will help circumvent this.

Hm. Saner regulatory environments seem to be pretty thin on the ground, lately.

Not sure I share your optimism that a significant number of companies will be willing to abandon a major world market, or to depend on a nudge-nudge-wink-wink "bypass our geofence and we'll pretend we don't notice your EU billing address" kind of thing...

Luckily now we not only have crypto-communication, but also currency :)

It is very easy to block VPN, Tor and other technologies. These can be in fact criminalised the same way drugs are. Possession of a VPN on your device could give you a criminal record.

This will in turn make encrypted devices, plausible deniability setups and steganography more pervasive.

The US lost the crypto wars, EU lost the piracy wars once, and they will lose again.

In some countries you can do time for not disclosing passwords. In the UK it is 5 years.

Again, this is where plausible deniability setups kick in.

Of course the EU can go full police state, but at that point I hope the regular citizens pushes back.

The goal is to raise the cost of enforcement.

Problem is that you cannot pretend you can't remember the password. So unless what you hide can give you more time than for not disclosing the password, then yes having things encrypted could help...

You can have different volumes for different passwords.

Plausible deniability.

This can be easily checked.

It is very easy to make unenforceable laws. Actually blocking VPNs would require something akin to the great firewall of China, which I don't see the EU building in the near future.

Criminalizing something means nothing if the laws can't be enforced. Torrenting copyrighted works is a criminal act, and yet torrenting has never been easier after years of efforts to shut it down from all sides.

They do worse - instead of just blocking the internet, they'll first inspect what is being uploaded to it.