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In my country, internet service providers offer YouTube only, work and learn packages, and Twitter only packages.

I activated YouTube only package and used a VPN. But I can only go to youtube and can't do internet surfing even though I am using a VPN. But as I know, a VPN encrypts the traffic, right? How do service providers block it?

I am using AVAST VPN. How is this technically possible?

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    If you can only access YouTube, how are you creating a VPN? My guess is that the ISP blocks the VPN.
    – schroeder ♦
    Commented Oct 28, 2022 at 7:41
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    This question is a duplicate of following one. I suggest to close it. The answer is the same: Check connection using tracert. If if is not routed via VPN, then this is the explanation. If connection is really routed via VPN, then the VPN provider blocks the resources you want to reach. In some countries VPN providers are only allowed, if they block resources that the government requires to block. There is no magic.
    – mentallurg
    Commented Oct 28, 2022 at 20:32

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As @schroeder suggests, if your ISP provides access only to Youtube and Twitter, it means that you can't connect to the VPN server and actually create a VPN. That's because your VPN server's domain differs from Youtube's or Twitter's domains so your ISP blocks any access to it. If that's true (you'll have to confirm yourself) that means that you don't use a VPN when you're surfing, so your ISP is able to block everything aside from Youtube and Twitter.

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  • Your VPN might actually be controlled by the ISP. And since the VPN must know your destinations, it can disallow any site it doesn’t like.
    – gnasher729
    Commented Dec 25, 2023 at 20:45
  • @gnasher729 the OP says they are using Avast VPN, not the ISP VPN
    – schroeder ♦
    Commented Apr 23 at 11:15
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There are two main possibilities here:

  1. Your ISP is doing their restriction correctly, and you have not in fact connected to the VPN at all because your VPN is not youtube.com and connections to any other server are blocked. Merely having a VPN isn't enough, you need to actually be using it, meaning you need to have established and be maintaining a connection between your device and the VPN server (among other things).
  2. Your ISP does its job poorly, probably by only filtering DNS queries, and doesn't otherwise actually restrict your traffic. This allows you to connect to DNS, if for example the DNS server is known by IP address rather than domain name. However, your VPN client is not configured to tunnel DNS queries through the VPN tunnel, so when you try to browse the web after connecting to VPN, your browser still sends the DNS query to the ISP, which either refuses to respond or sends back the wrong response because you requested a non-YouTube domain. In this case, you could fix the issue by tunneling the DNS traffic through the VPN, but it would probably be easier and faster to just direct DNS queries to a third-party DNS server (such as the ones Google or Cloudflare run), potentially via "DoH" (DNS over HTTPS, sometimes called "encrypted DNS" though that could also mean other things) or other way of obfuscating that these are DNS queries, just in case the ISP is blocking traffic to third parties on the DNS port or something like that.
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If your isp allowed vpn, then even though your traffic is encrypted they know the size of packages. Youtube videos will be large. That can be detected even with encryption. Twitter packages are small. That can also be detected. It’s not perfect.

If the isp installed software on your computer to enforce you only use youtube and Twitter, that software can send youtube and Twitter through vpn and block everything else.

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