VPNS need money to operate, and money businesses have anchors in the real, physical, brick-and-mortar world, which is ultimately under control of the British police, with their extendable batons and prison bars.
If you make money by laying asphalt on British streets and get paid in British pounds, there's no way for you to pay an internet business in Malta if the British government doesn't want you to. Sure, there's crypto, but crypto needs businesses which let it interface with the British banking system, which the UK government can instruct banks to shut down.
A internet based company in many countries can not be held to any law because the UK aren't a fan. Companies don't need to collect cash in the UK to run a business worldwide.
Which is why the next step is to accelerate the VPN ban wave to all countries, not just the UK. Australia, New Zealand, many European countries.
Eventually the bans will be widespread enough that VPNs become near meaningless. You won't be able to bypass streaming region locks, or access regional discounts. You won't be able to ensure E2EE privacy in some other region because all the major ones will be cracked down.
The only way forward will be running VPNs out of poorer countries, countries with less telecommunication restrictions, etc. Although this will come at the cost of latency. 100-200ms to connect to a Tajikistan VPN. From my experience, even Google Searches and YouTube playback become sluggish at 100ms+, the modern web has 1000 .js files executing every time a page loads and the 100ms delay just screws everything up. It's like browsing the web on a PS3 in 2026.
Once people start switching to Guatemalan VPNs, the Government will ban "manipulating networking routing" at the backhaul and ISP levels. You will not be able to adjust routing, it will become illegal. Before anyone says "you can't do that, it won't work", I was told the same thing when I said they'd ban VPNs, yet here we are.
One step at a time to erode privacy, security and freedom. Once you jump up a level, you cannot comprehend a world below that level. The mega restrictions of tomorrow are normalized in the new world.