TL;DR: Australia's March 9 age verification mandate sent VPN downloads skyrocketing as adult sites blocked Australian users rather than collect ID. The unintended consequence: privacy-conscious adults fleeing to free VPNs that may be worse for their data than the ID collection they're avoiding.
What happened
On March 9, 2026, Australia's eSafety Commissioner began enforcing mandatory age verification for adult content. The penalty for non-compliance: fines up to A$49.5 million.
Rather than collect sensitive ID from users, Aylo (the company behind Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn) made a "business decision" to simply block all Australian IP addresses. Users hitting these sites now see only safe-for-work content.
The VPN downloads started immediately. According to Sensor Tower data, within days of March 9:
- VPN Super Unlimited Proxy jumped from 40th to 7th in free iPhone apps
- Proton VPN shot from 174th to 19th
- NordVPN climbed from 189th to 13th
- VPN Unlimited advanced 42 spots to reach #7
Three of the top 15 most downloaded free apps in the Australian App Store on March 9 were VPN services.
The privacy double-bind
Here's the problem nobody's talking about: the people downloading free VPNs to protect their privacy may be making things worse.
"Using a free VPN runs the risk that in trying to protect your privacy, you're sharing your data with an organisation, the VPN company, that will sell it on to unknown parties to make its money," Professor Michael Cowling of RMIT University's School of Computing Technologies told RMIT News.
Think about it. Users refused to hand their ID to adult sites. So instead they're handing their entire browsing history to random VPN companies headquartered who-knows-where.
The paid options like Proton VPN and NordVPN have established privacy policies and have been audited. The free ones climbing the charts? VPN Super Unlimited Proxy isn't exactly known for its transparency.
The enforcement gap
Not every site is playing along. XVideos, xHamster, and XNXX continue operating without age verification, apparently willing to risk the A$49.5 million fines.
This creates an absurd outcome: Australia's law pushed the largest, most established platforms to block access, driving users to smaller sites with potentially worse privacy practices, or to VPNs that may be selling their data.
Cowling suggests the real solution isn't technical barriers at all: "The real way to curtail underage usage of these services is to provide better digital literacy and content training."
The surveillance-backfire pattern
Australia's age verification debacle follows a familiar pattern: government tries to control internet access, users route around it, and privacy gets worse for everyone.
This is the same country that banned social media for under-16s in December 2025, the first nation to do so. Now they've extended mandatory age verification to AI chatbots serving adult content to minors.
Each restriction pushes users toward workarounds. Each workaround introduces new risks. The surveillance state creates the very chaos it claims to prevent.