From a security perspective it seems 100% the correct call for the government sites filtering out traffic that is probably used for fraud rather than legit purposes 99.9% of the time. How are you doing any those the tasks you mentioned without inputting your personal information into the government website? And I assume you are, so then why are you using a public VPN at that point unless your just trying to make things difficult.

You can use a VPN to try and hide your activity from the government, but becomes a fools errand when you are purposefully interacting with the government.

I'm in the US. It varies widely.

I think what happens sometimes, is we get caught up in anti-abuse lists. Sites see legit abuse coming from VPN IPs. After that happens enough, those IPs end up on anti-abuse filters. Then those blocklists are used by some sites, and not othrs, so some sites won't work.

There are also whole countries who block VPN now for social control. And others who talk about blocking them soon. That's not the case where I live. But there are still many individual sites that use blocklists.

There are also more sites using identity resolution services now. If the identity service can't pin you to a human real life person, it increases your block score. If your block score is high enough, you get , um, blocked.

I would never use a VPN for sites that require me to log in with my real name, in that case the VPN has no added value and you are actively sabotaging the privacy you're trying to gain by using a VPN for general browsing.

In fact, I have a seperate browser for sites that require me to log in with my real identity.