this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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I wouldn't be surprised if google/YouTube just bans all VPN IPs. They already make you sign in lately if your IP range has been "shadow banned."
It very much is possible to ban "all" public and even commercial VPNs. VPN traffic tends to have very distinct characteristics in logs and it is not overly difficult for orgs to get the IP ranges allocated to each company.
What is not possible is banning all vpn traffic in the sense that a friend or family member sets up wireguard for you. But that is a drop in the bucket to the point of being functionally nonexistent.
The middle ground, of course, are pseudo-botnets of compromised computers. But those also tend to be a fairly small percentage (outside of DDOSing) and are likely getting blocked for other reasons.
There are even companies selling lists of IPs for all sort of behaviour and characteristics. Just adding one of those is trivial.
Though google has a lot more data and engineers so they could just create a better one themselves.
It is a constant cat and mouse game between VPN providers and other actors. A few IPs get on a list, they try to find others, repeat
If your corporate VPN is routing ALL traffic then your IT department are idiots. And I am pretty sure said company would thank google for blocking youtube from their employees.
Depends.
I am in uni, so a bit different, but there's many sites that allow access to articles, studies, books, etc. to us based on source IP. And I guess it could be hard to route only those, especially if some of them decide to use Cloudflare or similar.
Another option is doing so for easier monitoring of work devices that people will always try to use for things they're not supposed to.
And, when discussing stuff like this, it is important to understand that "all VPNs" actually means corporate and public VPNs.
If you want to have an actual conversation then context matters. Rather than just fixating on nonsensical overly literal interpretations because you only want to be "technically correct" by attacking a strawman.
It’s always funny when a service “bans” the use of a VPN but you can almost always find a server that works.
They can't ban all VPN IPs though
Me: imdb movie name.. thinking it will save me a second.
"Click the stop signs"
Me: fuck it, I really didn't need to know if that actor was also the one who played in other movie.
We were trained into saving time with search engines, now I have to remember to not use them and just type in imdb.com and then use their search function
There are several domains specific search features like duckduckgo bangs that allow you to directly search popular websites with text like
interstellar !imdb- it's super useful! I think firefox has something like this built in too.Imgur bans my IP from a Digital Ocean droplet of my own build. Just sayin', they're not only operating from known IP ranges.
A digital ocean IP is going to be under a specific ASN with information on multiple ip ranges. These ASN under a corporation are public and easy to block.
https://asrank.caida.org/orgs/949de93ab6
It happens if there's a lot of traffic from the same IP, happened to me when I first imported my subscriptions into smart tube on my tv after I cancelled YouTube premium when they jacked up the price. Was just a temporary ban though.