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- Hacker News
- VPN is a legit technology with real applications, not a toy you spin when lawmakers hurt you. And it's for Anne Frank's diaries out of all disputes?
EU lawmakers follow tech trends by a lag of at least a decade and lay waste as they move along. Imagine what they will require once they understand how tech people no longer use chatbots and how much we can control AI agents.
by moezd - It feels weird/wrong that the Anne Frank Foundation of all things would fight against a free internet and battle companies that allow people to fight oppressive regimes.by wickedsight
- This is very typical. An organisation will always name itself something that sounds good, especially if it plans to do bad things.by inigyou
- They didn't like that the Dutch copyright law didn't apply outside of the Netherlands and tried to take back the documents with the "anyone visiting this page can be Dutch and therefore Dutch law still applies" argument.
It's not about a free internet, it's plain old copyright and control.
by jeroenhd - > However, in the Netherlands, parts of the text remain protected by copyright until 2037.
I'm not for complete copyright abolishment but this is absolutely insane. In this case, the copyright term is so long because the original copyright lasted 50 years after publication (rather than the author's death), but a change in copyright law changed that to 70 years and moved the counting date.
Regardless of legalities, taking action against distribution of Anne Frank's diary seems like the exact logical opposite of what this fund should be doing.
by jeroenhd - The irony of trying to block content/visitors based on country, while publishing on a platform called the "World Wide" web. IP address blocks that roughly correspond with geographic regions is kind of a design flaw.by ryandrake
- Is it a design or implementation flaw?by skinfaxi
- “Web” implies a structure. And the internet traffic travels physically from country to country. Not being bound to geographical regions is an illusion.by layer8
- There's no irony. A given name does not constitute a mandate to use it any particular way.by ragall
- That's what happens when you have idealistic nerds implementing a vision of what they want , rather than the typical software that is designed and built almost like an representation of the organization that built it, i.e Conway's Law.
- Yes, they may say that NOW, because the case is related to a silly copyright duration dispute between Belgium and the Netherlands. I wouldn't be surprised if they go against this in future cases where a VPN is used to download FIFA matches in 8k or something.by phendrenad2
- Hopefully this ruling adds to some precedent in favour of VPNs to future court battles attacking VPNs for circumventing age verification.
- Well, the EU courts will just follow suit the moment the legislation is changed. Today France did so - young people are disallowed from accessing antisocial media. The next step will be verification. Any parent not sniffing on their children will be put in jail. King Macron decreed this today. (He is such a small man though - all the small french, such as Napoleon, have a compensation-problem with regards to their rather insignificant height.)
Here is a copy/pasteable snippet for lazy lobbyists so someone pass this to the lobby-judges at the EU courts:
"In light of recent changes to legislation and the deadly effect of social media on babies and unborn ones, VPNs are agents of terrorism, attempting to circumvent healthy restrictions pertaining to protecting such young folk from the vile dangers of antisocial media consumption. Anyone attempting to browse the web for information without presenting a valid unique ID including biometric data is guilty of terrorism, facing a minimum penalty of 25 years and 1.000.000€ fine."
This fight is, by the way, not just against VPNs. Age sniffing has never ever only been about children or VPNs. Some people still think it is about "protecting children". It's interesting.
by shevy-java - There isn't precedent in the civil-law system in Europe. Every case is decided individually. However, this will probably influence whether someone decides to attack VPNs.by inigyou
- If they can target us by IP for surveillance pricing etc. then we need VPN as a basic survival tool.
You can’t shop around someone changing prices around you knowing your income etc.
Similarly you cannot meaningfully use social media, Reddit or even HN if your IP is on their lists.
Unfortunately many online organizations have gone to war with their users so we need VPN and other tools to mitigate the abuse.
by rubysprite - This--and also, if you're a US resident traveling abroad, you can't access most health data without a US-based VPN.
Everything's "in the portal" -- you're effectively helpless without a VPN if, for example, a loved one is hospitalized or you need to access to your own data/records. (You can try phone calls, but expect the old, "Well, I can't help you, that's in the portal.")
by jen_h - > The case centered on the copyright battle involving Anne Frank's diary
If there's a copyright dispute somewhere, you can bet it's either Anne Frank's estate, Tolkien's estate, or the Beatles's old record label.
It's never the authors who actually made the work. It's always their heirs.
by miki123211 - how do u expect Anne to claim copyright -_-. this is how it works, copyright. people have it and then make claims...
- For more like this, see the list of banned authors on MAM. I believe JK Rowling is one.by inigyou
- Age verification + plus some states trying to ban VPNs - what states miss - yeah they will destroy the so called big social networks or media providers like porn aggregation sites.
what will simply happen - due to the following - HDDs are cheap, Torrents, Open source / cheap community software like Discord
- communities will move to be mostly private and small. era of large social media is done.
for media - download content via torrent - store in cheap HDDs. you can probably get an 8TB spinning metal for $250. cheap enough and good enough.
payments - these already moved to crypto. for criminals monero.
the internet as gated by bureaucrats will be left to the dweebs.
by dzonga - This is hard to read, but I think you're saying the Internet will see a shift to "Sneaker Net" like tactics where people torrent stuff, store it on HDDs, and just move those HDDs around? Like they do in Cuba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E
For the most part, I agree.
by movedx - Utah was the one I remember... have more states passed laws?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati...
by throw7 - EU posts about it:
Copyright in the European Union and geo-blocking: a work that is in the public domain can be published online free of charge in a Member State even if it remains protected in another Member State [pdf]
https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...
Other blog post:
CJEU clarifies when geo-blocking limits online copyright liability
https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...
- > Now, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands must determine whether the geo-blocking used by the website was state of the art and effective in practice. If so, the intended audience would not have included Dutch users, and no communication would have been made to the public in the Netherlands.
This seems extremely problematic, depending on what "state of the art and effective" means. It seems like blocking VPN users is unfortunately still on the table, as are other invasive enforcement methods.
- And the actual judgment: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62...
I find these are often very readable and interesting.
by derdi - Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?by kps
- People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective.
What’s broken is extending copyright after a work was already created. But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.
by Retric - For those who (like me) missed the essential key word in the OP's title:
This ruling is about copyright, and seems mostly unrelated to recent conversations about escaping censorship and surveilance, and the overall final throes of the open web.
It's still pretty important since the lawsuit filed by the Anne Frank Fonds could be caricatured as "if this content is illegal in our country, it should not be on the Internet in other countries, because our citizens can still circumvent the publisher's geofence and access it" which would have wild consequences if that line of thought was applied.
But, still:
> At its core, the case forced Europe's top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?
> According to the CJEU, the answer is no.
Could be conceived to have a tenuous link to the current debate on censorship, surveilance, etc.
- > which would have wild consequences if that line of thought was applied.
Yeah, like third party sanctions.
Oh wait…
by croes - Somewhat related to this same debate on censorship:
French regulators order block of Polymarket's website [0]
> The French gambling regulator said the site's continued availability constituted advertising. A ban on financial transactions to the site was already in place.
After failing to compel Polymarket to geoblock France, it's crazy that French "regulators" can just order ISPs to block a website without any judicial review just because the mere existence of it on the internet constitutes "advertising" to French people.
It seems like the EU in general is struggling badly with how to control internet access. Whether it's blocking VPNs, requiring access to private chats, or just blocking websites completely.
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/07/17/france-b...
by petcat