Sure, they always could get a license of some of the browsers, and still it will be hard to force people switch to that browser, simply cause people are used to work in a Chrome, or Firefox, or even Edge, this software is convenient, and mostly it works perfect. It will be very hard for government, and they will lose trust even more, it's kinda painful to use services that our government provides, it's usually slow, full of bugs and it's takes long time for them to fix it.

By mentioning VPN I meant it will be the way to get a normal software if the will block the downloads and updates for the certian browsers.

Of course user privacy it's other topic and I don't think that most of the people will pay for the VPN.