Denmark can't decide if it wants to ban VPNs or not

It seems 2025 has been a year of change for the internet. When you don't have governments insisting that citizens need to upload their ID to access adult sites (a data leak time bomb waiting to explode), you've got them insisting on accessing all your social media content from the last five years before giving you a visa. Well, it seems that Denmark didn't want to miss out on all the drama, because it announced plans for a VPN ban, and has swiftly backtracked soon after.

The proposed bill, from the Danish Ministry of Culture, took a slightly different angle from other countries that are limiting internet freedom or VPN access. Rather than claiming that it's a measure to protect children or expose criminals, the logic here is that VPNs need to be banned because they threaten copyright laws by making it easy for people to access content that shouldn't be available to them. 'Won't somebody think of the corporations?'

What they're worried about, for example, is people using a VPN to access another country's Netflix library. I can understand businesses (and consequently, governments) being worried about this, but the idea of banning VPNs over it is overkill.. The best VPN services, like NordVPN, Proton VPN, Surfshark, CyberGhost, or ExpressVPN are much more than just a cover for cyber-pirates.

Entertainment aside, a VPN ban would also rob Danish people of their privacy. Google, Meta, X, and countless other corporations are sucking every bit of data that they can from internet users, swelling to the size of grotesquely bloated ticks, because what they've extracted is essentially the person's whole life. It is not unreasonable that somebody might want to use a VPN to protect themselves from some of that.

Then there's also the fact that VPNs play an important role in protecting people from cybersecurity threats on public WiFi networks. Without a VPN, people risk losing their logins or even having malware put onto their phones. It's such a problem that the French government recently encouraged people to use VPNs whenever they connect to free WiFi.

Luckily, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, Denmark's Minister of Culture, seems to have done a U-turn here, clarifying that he never wanted to suggest that a VPN ban would be introduced. It's hard to know for sure whether or not this was a miscommunication or a hasty course correction, but it's good news either way.

However, it wasn't long ago that Peter Hummelgaard, the Minister of Justice, said "we must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services." This very anti-privacy statement is quite alarming and consistent with the idea of banning VPNs. Hopefully that's the end of it, but I know I'd be very conscious of my privacy if I lived in Denmark right now.

If you're thinking about getting a VPN, I recommend our partner, NordVPN. It's got connection points all over the world, is super secure, and really fast too. It's an ideal solution.