Why Clueless Politicians Who Think That They Can Control the Internet Always Fail

Shôn Ellerton, December 16, 2025
Social media and VPN bans, digital censorship, and eradication of piracy sites put in place by stupid politicians never work.

When will so many of our clueless and technically inept politicians ever learn that they will never be in control of the Internet?

Truth is, they will never be able to do so, as they simply do not understand it. And when they try to suppress it to their own needs or try to ban people from accessing certain parts of it, they always fail.

But first, a quick paragraph to illustrate the birth of the Internet.

The World Wide Web, as designed by Tim Berners-Lee, originated in 1989 with his successful HTTP protocol, a free and open way to digitally communicate across the globe. Being an open protocol, it never had security in mind, and it certainly wasn’t designed to be a medium of control by any state or government to push their propaganda across.

Certainly, there was an Internet-of-sorts prior to this. When I was thirteen, I played around with bulletin boards (BBS), a precursor to today’s Internet in a way. It had chat rooms, games to play, and instructions on how to make your own fireworks, an activity which is generally not encouraged!

Mainstream had no clue on what we were doing as kids. We were the geeks and the nerds, and we hated just about everything the varsity letter jacket-wearing sports jock stood for.

Okay. We were just jealous because they were stealing all the girls!

We were the forgotten shadows in school corridors who, later in life, became tech-savvy and, in many cases, became successful at careers in science and technology whilst many of the once-imposing and charismatic jocks of high-school years fizzled into insignificance.

For film afficionados, the coming-of-age 1983 sci-fi flick WarGames is a great watch with a young Matthew Broderick demonstrating to one of the girls in his school how he can hack into the school system and change his grades. It was an inspiring film for the geeks and the nerds because not only does he manage to take down the national defence system while the jocks in his class endlessly kick around an oblong ball, he also gets the girl!

During those bulletin board days, I had a line modem which connected me to the world. It probably felt more like those using a short-wave radio except rather than voice, it was purely text. There were password-protected areas, but vast swathes of it was not. There was information out there that would most certainly raise the attention of various institutions, prying parents and the government should they have come across it. Sure, compared to today’s Internet, it was much smaller, but it delivered quite a punch when it came to highly contentious content. Today’s Usenet newsgroups, a service I still use today, is probably the true successor to yesterday’s bulletin boards.

The only people who knew about all this stuff back in the 80s were either techy people or people-in-the-know who work or had worked during that digital era. I used to surf the bulletin boards and be able to connect to other likeminded kids who had the technical knowledge and persistence to understand how to use them. To be blunt, anyone who had no passing interest on how a cordless telephone works, must have deemed themselves to be a right dolt when it came to what us young techies were up to on our computers.

The appetite for curiosity for people like me back in those days was almost insatiable whilst exploring the connected digital world. Honestly, I can’t recollect any girl getting into this stuff back then, although, I’m sure, somewhere out there, there were. In my case, it was a very small clique of more-than-average intelligent geeky boys who were exploring digital spaces which would only become mainstream decades later. Naturally, those spaces tended to be games, instructions on how to make anything illegal, and, of course, porn. All in text format, alas.

Boys will always be boys.

Well. I guess, not much has really changed as of 2025, has it? Except the graphics are a bit good and today’s platforms are now designed to include people with no technical skills at all.

Once a predominantly male activity, girls now probably represent a bigger proportion of users.

Back then, nothing in the way of parental or governmental intervention was even remotely considered, although there were works of science-fiction which encapsulated the addiction of young people being immersed in a digital world. Such as Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story, The Veldt, in which two kids, being threatened by their parents that their hologram nursery is about to be cut off because they were addicted to being surrounded by death in a lion and vulture-infested African savannah setting which the parents thought as being very unwholesome. In retaliation, the kids laid a trap and the parents wandered into the veldt hologram in which they were killed by the lions which somehow turned to life.

During my university years, the Internet Proper sprang into life around 1990 or so. Oddly enough, I don’t remember using much of it at all until the late 1990s. Perhaps it was simply due to accessing the Internet using rudimentary and expensive modems along with high subscription prices over the phone lines. After all, these were the early days of consumer-available ADSL, a time which, if you had a 2MB line, you were doing damn well!

Now this always strikes me as being interesting when I recollect my early career as an engineer. I had not sent one email until something like 1998 or 1999! We did everything through those primitive things called faxes. But suddenly, just like that, everyone in the office was on email around 2000 or so. And then there was the office Internet which was abused to high heaven. I was working at T-Mobile at the time, and honestly, some of the stuff my workmates were watching on the Internet was not entirely in line with the working ethics of any office. But again, corporate IT security was in its infancy as well and the politically-correct ‘brain police’ didn’t really exist. Even our bosses revelled in some of the crude stuff we were absorbing on the office Internet.

They were good times. And, to be frank, no one really cared. In those days, it was the loud majority that prevailed meaning that the silent offended minority had to buckle up and put on a thicker skin. For example, these days, and in some countries, you could be put in the slammer for insulting someone on social media. Elizabeth Kinney, a nurse in the UK, got arrested in November 2025 by no less than eleven policemen whilst having a bath. This was on the charge of calling one of her male attackers a faggot in a private message to a friend of mutual acquaintance. In my opinion, The UK had become a political basket case from the mid-90s when political-correctness dominated the social and political zeitgeist. As of 2025, the UK has now arrested and charged more people than any other country in the world for sending offensive posts on social media including those in private! By the way, for those unfamiliar with the ‘offending’ term, apart from the obvious insulting definition, the word ‘faggot’, also refers to delicious meatballs and is also used as a term to describe a bundle of something, like a faggot of sticks.

But, you know, the politically-correct in our society are, in most cases, stupid cretins with little or no real-life education. They’re the ones who have seldom travelled, had little or no experience involving any danger, and those white-collar Kevins and Karens who have never suffered much in the way of hardship because they used Mummy and Daddy’s money.

With regard to certain areas of the Internet being under the censorious spotlight, one of the first parts of it I remember the most was the war against piracy. This was back in 2003 or so when piracy websites proliferated disseminating copyrighted movies and music. This was in Britain and it involved the takedown of sites which hosted data files for download called nzb files. These data files were very small but what they did was provide the metadata needed to download for free just about any movie, piece of music, or book using a piece of client software through newsgroups servers like Usenet, Astraweb, and Giganews.

Peer-to-peer sites existed as well but they were somewhat easier to eradicate and were far easier to track making it easier for the authorities to clamp down on offending uploaders and downloaders. However, VPNs became extremely popular which made it very difficult to pinpoint who was uploading, downloading and sharing illegal content. Newsgroups, especially using a VPN, made such activities virtually impossible to track.

For those not in ‘the know’, a VPN or virtual private network, is simply a way to spoof your IP address. For example, the BBC in the United Kingdom has geo-blocked some of its content from users outside of the UK, but with your VPN set to the UK, you can access it. Yes, it is certainly possible for destination websites to detect if someone is using a VPN and deny access, but there are additional workarounds like DNS proxy accounts by companies like SmartDNSProxy, which is one I’ve used for quite some time.

During those days back in the early 2000s, movie streaming services didn’t exist in earnest and I was, and still is, an avid cult movie collector. There were many movies which I simply couldn’t buy. The world was, and still is, bizarrely, plagued by regional DVD settings, which, of course, can be circumvented with the right equipment and know-how. For example, if you buy a DVD movie in the United States, it would normally be encoded as a Region 1 disc making it unplayable on, say, a DVD player purchased in Australia which can only play Region 4 or Region-neutral discs. Naturally, this frustrating restriction is easily skirted by buying ‘region-free’ DVD players. Any avid movie collector wouldn’t even contemplate buying a region-restricted DVD player.

Even the analogue world of magnetic tapes had ways to make it difficult to copy content. Commercially-bought VHS movies were often encoded with something called Macrovision, a signal which made it difficult to copy VHS tapes without having streaks of dark and light stripes running through the copied movie. But I remember buying a little device which connected between two VCRs which removed the intended distortion.

Problem solved!

Already here it is proving the point that once such measures are put in place to either put a fence around certain geographical areas of the world in the case of DVD regional codes or inserting Macrovision codes into VHS to make it difficult to copy without distortion, someone has worked out a way to work around this.

I did, and I daresay, that movie buffs with an iota of technical knowledge did as well.

We had the software and hardware to circumvent all of this.

Now back to the websites hosting nzb files which were taken down. The websites which allow users with the right software to download just about any movie, piece of music, or book that they want.

Successful law suits emerged which did facilitate the takedown of many of these nzb websites as they were deemed piracy sites. Although not a newsgroups or nzb website, but rather a peer-to-peer music-sharing platform, Napster, was one of the first to be taken down but interestingly enough, they ‘legalised’ themselves up and went to be a legit retailer download site removing itself from the piracy clan. However, many others were removed.

But like the Greek many-headed Hydra serpent, you cut off one head and another two materialise. The MPAA (Movie Picture Association of America) and Brein, organisations brought about to fight media piracy, had spent millions and millions of dollars annually to try to remove these websites finally giving up the ghost when superior and far more comprehensive nzb websites materialised out of countries like Finland and Russia who, to be honest, didn’t really give a rat’s ass about MPAA’s and Brein’s demands for site takedowns.

Since the advent of streaming services like Netflix and Disney, it seems that the fight against newsgroups piracy of downloading movies has diminished to almost being non-existent. There are so few people using newsgroups these days compared to the masses, that it’s a pointless war to fight given the returns. However, many streaming services had become greedy from around 2020 or so making it difficult to share accounts and electing to remove material at the drop of a hat because some other streaming service bought the licence to host certain movies or TV shows. This, of course, led to many subscribers of multiple streaming services platforms realising that they are spending way too much money to access content they want.

And hey, presto! Piracy sites have returned!

And with quite a vengeance. Professional-looking websites with similar functionality to Netflix or Disney have reared up out of nowhere hosted from countries immune to laws that force them to take them down or be fined. Angry industries hurt by these pirate sites prod their governments to do something about it, and sometimes they do, by forcing any ISP in the country to block access to that website. However, with DNS proxy software and VPNs, this is again a fruitless battle and tech-savvy people just know how to get around it. Look, if more than thirty percent of China’s users can access content blocked by the notorious Great Firewall of China, do you really think that inept and bumbling governments from Australia, the UK and western Europe can do the same? The Chinese government have maintained their national firewall, but really, they know full well that there will always be those who can circumnavigate it.

As for VPNs, there is an insane move by the US state of Wisconsin to ban VPNs as part of the safety campaign to stop kids from accessing certain parts of the Internet. Seriously, if China had deemed it a pointless exercise to make VPNs illegal, do you really think the wishy-washy douchebag politicians who run the state of Wisconsin can make it work?

Of course not!

These politicians, primed by ‘do-gooder’ groups, often dominated by middle-aged women, to ban something because a very small segment of society got hurt by it, try to enact legislation that is simply unworkable. They do so, of course, for garnering votes to keep them in power.

As for VPNs, most businesses use them. Schools, colleges and universities use them. Government bodies use them to relay sensitive information. And, of course, as a consumer, you’d be unwise not to use one in a café that hosts free WiFi. Criminalising the use of VPNs would backfire so tremendously, that those politicians who had instigated the idea would be laughed all the way to the exit door.

But still, these lessons of the futility to ban things never seem to be absorbed by these clueless politicians.

On December 10^th, 2025, Australia switched on its utterly mad ban on social media for those under sixteen years of age. I had written more about this in an earlier article titled Australian Authoritarianism May be a Reality if the Social Media Ban for Under 16s Kicks Into Effect back in June 2025.

I summed it up stating that it will fail.

And, assuredly, it did! And within 24 hours of doing so.

In less than a couple of days, frustrated teenagers have found a myriad of ways to skirt the policy including the use of VPNs, fake age verification techniques and finding alternative social media platforms hosted in countries like Russia and China, countries with governments that are not submissive to the petty demands by the Australian government. If anything, they are probably laughing at those politicians who were involved in setting it up and spruiking it across the globe, all at the taxpayers’ expense.

Incidentally, the two main characters pushing the Australian social media ban, Anika Wells and Julie Inman Grant, both very unlikeable characters judging from how they portray themselves on camera, have been caught with their proverbial panties down after the revelation that they had usurped hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers money to cater for their lavish trips and family holidays. It’s quite a show indeed because there is now a national sweeping investigation of other Australian politicians who had been morally abusing their privileges whilst many Australians are struggling to pay their own bills.

And still, this condescending and, frankly, nasty mob in favour of the ban are doubling down on the success of it! Even if it means, in the future, to restrict the rights of everyone else by forcing them to age-verify and identify themselves through some sort of digital ID.

But that’s the intended plan, of course.

It’s now become apparent that quite a few older people with little or no technical knowledge are being kicked off social media bans instead of the intended under-16s. Not only that, those teenagers which already have successful YouTube and Facebook accounts covering sport, politics, and other wholesome activities, have had some of their accounts already cut off and deleted. It’s as if those wankers in power don’t want teenagers to have a platform to share their work and political views, all because a segment of society have weak parents who buy their young teens a smartphone and then being held hostage to their kids who demand that they cannot be told what to do. It also rides on the backbone of the weakening of the generic parent and child discipline issue which has pervaded the West in a major way paving the way for government to take control of parenting our children.

Weak, overly-emotional, and technically-void parents, most of them being women, because of the emotional factor, are largely responsible for this. This is something I wrote about in a piece I did titled The 55mph Speed Limit, Women’s Concern Groups and the Power of the Appeal to Emotion, in which I cover how the appeal to emotion by women’s groups creates policies that others have to suffer through for the sake of the lowest common denominator.

OK.

So the social media ban fails big time.

Kids turn to Rumble instead of YouTube. They go to smaller and lesser known social media sites which haven’t been ‘found out’ and to be included as part of the ban. God forbid, they discover 4Chan, a completely open social media platform and, I have to say, a cesspool of hate, pornography, and general nastiness that doesn’t require any account.

So, the answer?

There is now talk of age-verifying anyone to use popular search engines like Google and Microsoft’s Bing from December 27^th.

Again, the politicians who are promoting this have zero clue what they are up against. The first thing that springs to mind is how terribly stupid they are. It’s a scary thought that these lunatics hold the reins of power.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing are targeted to be part of this new plan but there are hundreds of lesser-known search engines in the world. I think it will be highly unlikely that DuckDuckGo, a great and politically unbiassed search engine I frequently use, will concede to these new rules. And if they did, there will be new ones that pop up sporadically.

And they might start targeting browsers after that. Who knows? But again, there are many other lesser-known browsers other than Chrome, Safari and Edge out there.

And finally, there’s the deep web accessible through the Tor network. I’ve tried it myself and it’s a quite a hostile environment and, unfortunately, all too easy to access. I’ve never seen so many openly advertised services, paid through decentralised cryptocurrency, which are highly illegal. After only spending an hour on it, I realised the scary prospect that a parallel digital universe of crime right beneath our nose is practically undetectable by any agency. The only prospect of criminals getting caught is through the final physical transaction of a delivery of something illegal having occurred, someone going undercover posing as a customer of illegal content, or some awful act of human debasement that some random witness just happened to be there and then report it.

To sum it up, the relentless push by governments to promote policies that ban anything on the Internet only pushes those who resist these policies to go elsewhere and into deeper and darker places.

Education and enlightenment is the only way.

All politicians should read the Aesop fable about the Sun and the Wind.

Here’s a summary of that brilliant fable!

~

The Sun and the Wind were having a competition to see if they can remove a coat from this man wandering around in the countryside.

The Wind tried first.

He blew and blew and blew and blew. Harder and harder.

But, alas, the man just pulled his jacket tighter around himself.

The Sun, with a friendly smile, just shone a little stronger.

The air was nice and warm and the man decided to simply remove his coat.