Congress Has Another Site-Blocking Bill, And This One Targets VPNs

In speculative fiction, the most chilling dystopias rarely arrive with a bang. They arrive with paperwork. The American Copyright Protection Act is precisely that kind of document—a seemingly narrow piece of intellectual property enforcement that, upon closer inspection, contains the blueprints for a very different kind of internet. Site-blocking has been tried before, and it has always failed on technical and legal merits alike. But this bill's targeting of VPNs is something new: an admission that the old playbook of blocking individual domains is obsolete. The real target is the infrastructure of evasion itself. Think about what a VPN actually is. It's a tunnel, a private corridor through the public square. It protects journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens from surveillance. It lets expatriates watch their home country's news. It lets a teenager in a restrictive state access a library of human knowledge. To legislate against the tunnel is to declare that the public square must be the only place you're allowed to walk. That's not a copyright policy. That's an architectural philosophy—one where the internet's fundamental design principle of decentralization is treated as a bug to be patched out. The EFF's analysis, linked from their deeplinks page (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/congress-has-another-site-blocking-bill-and-one-targets-vpns), correctly identifies this as an assault on basic internet infrastructure. But let's push the speculative thread further. Every time a government builds a wall, it also builds a map of its own anxieties. The ACPA tells us what the future's gatekeepers fear most: not piracy, but the very notion of a network that routes around control. In the coming decades, as we layer augmented reality, digital identity, and machine-to-machine commerce onto this substrate, the question of who controls the routing becomes the question of who controls reality itself. We've seen this story before, in the net neutrality wars, in the encryption debates, in the steady erosion of anonymity. Each time, the argument is dressed in the language of protection—protecting artists, protecting consumers, protecting the flag. But the through-line is consistent: the open, permissionless, borderless internet is an anomaly in human history, and there are always those who wish to domesticate it. The ACPA may or may not pass, but its very existence normalizes the idea that your connection to the world is a privilege that can be routed, filtered, and revoked. In the speculative future we're already living in, that's the most dangerous idea of all.