I am sorry you see it this way, when the very subject at hand is a practical example of how the EU has planned and built a wallet around the very same ideas you seem to cherish.
Unfortunately, now that it comes to the news cycle, it’s easy to get outraged around misleading headlines.
I encourage you to invest time in researching what the EU has done in the past decade around digital identities and their framing around privacy questions on this. I hope you will find, as I do, that it moved the needle in t he right direction.
I don't care for a limited and selective best-possible interpretation of a subset of measures viewed in isolation. The point is that a broader set of vectors are being used continuously to gradually ensnare and limit digital freedom.
This is not a misleading headline, this is a document from the European Parliamentary Research Service that calls out VPNs as a technology that may need to be moderated in order to enforce restrictions such as age verification.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
As you are calling me out - specifically answer how restricting access to VPNs would benefit the freedom of thought, communication, and information within Europe, and not be something that - together with other measures - can help facilitate digital fascism.