still feels a little bit like the old internet.

Yes! I miss it.

Commercial VPNs are too inconvenient and saturated these days. It is not 2010 anymore. Every commercial VPN is leveraged by scrapers and other bots. If you use them, expect to face captchas. For the same price as a commercial VPN provider I rent a VPS and run OpenVPN on it. Personal, private, dedicated IPv4.

You are all nerds, act like it.

I do not belive it feasible to police personal consumer WAPs or force mac address filtering on them. Perhaps they will block the mac addresses on govt APs.