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Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs
whynotlearn
Member
Adding the first few paragraphs of the link
Utah's Online Age Verification Amendments, formally Senate Bill 73, take effect on May 6, making the state the first in the U.S. to explicitly target VPN use as part of age verification legislation.
Signed by Governor Spencer Cox on March 19, the controversial law establishes that a user is considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically located there, regardless of whether they use a VPN or proxy to mask their IP address. It also prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.
NordVPN has called the law an "unresolvable compliance paradox" and a "liability trap," arguing that it holds websites responsible for identifying users whose tools are specifically designed to be unidentifiable. The EFF warned that the legal risk could push sites to either ban all known VPN IPs or mandate age verification for every visitor globally.
Comments
I don't see how there is a problem with this. If Utah doesn't want websites to be operated inside its territory or not is up to them, isn't it?
No, because Utah is asking websites to detect these VPN users, VPNs which are somewhat undetectable by websites and forcing liability to the website owner.
In essense, my understanding of it is that its an unenforcable and a dystopian law.
Although this is just my understanding reading the article and I hope I am able to present a side of WHY there is a problem
Edit: the article also talks about the technical flaw, The law is also technically flawed, given that it assumes that a web provider can reliably detect VPN traffic and determine a user’s true physical location — they can’t. IP reputation databases such as MaxMind and IP2Proxy can flag traffic from known datacenter IP ranges, but commercial VPN providers rotate addresses constantly, and residential VPN endpoints are largely indistinguishable from standard home connections. Autonomous System Number analysis can catch traffic originating from datacenter networks, but can’t identify a personal WireGuard tunnel running on a cloud VPS, for example, which routes through the same infrastructure as ordinary web hosting.
Yeah, i got that. Basically operating a website inside Utah (or by some other means coming under their jurisdiction) is now outlawed. Not my personal favorite but i figure if Utah just simply hates websites they are well within their rights to remove them from their premises.
i hold @MikeA accountable for why i dont have 150000usd balance in my extravm account
So what is the problem, it is the accepted international practice after all. /s
Not entirely accurate. After all the EU actually recommends VPN for tourists and similar to get around their age verification. Well, at least for now(tm) that is.
Sarcasm aside, this whole age check/digital ID/whatever garbage is quite obviously some kind of concerted effort sooner or later to hit pretty much everywhere in way or the other.
As far as my personal take on this is concerned, a bunch of authoritarian assholes are trying very hard to get this pesky internet thing finally fully back inside the bottle. Age verification and filter requirements are just an initial push to get one foot in the door. The EU's age verification is actually nothing but a light version of their digital ID/documentation management system.
Yay, more regulation. Exactly what's needed.
Seems like a way to kick small businesses in the ***
This law can't be enforced onto other states or the Internet in general. It's plainly retarded. Is the Utah Governor this dumb? What's next? Does everyone have to block any connection coming from Utah?
Dumb, corrupt, compromised or simply evil? Your guess is as good as mine.
It seems that some of the age verification laws are lobbied by Meta and other mega corporations. Here are some theories that I have seen pop up online:
Basically there IS a concentrated effort into creating a centralized internet, you wouldn't be wrong about this and the worst part is that we are going on these trajectories as UK and others are doing too.
The internet is already quite centralized but its not enough as they want to centralize it even more at the regulatory effort to drive out any effort of it decentralizing and I do worry about LET providers in this case too as I feel like these laws are getting quite dystopian that there is a genuine reasonable doubt that maybe they already are/ or will be in near future impacted by these unenforcable regulatory rules.
This observation might be correct as far as the US is concerned. I am not sure since i am not really that deep into domestic US politics but it is also my impression that big tech seems to play a major role in this regard over there.
In the EU the situation is somewhat different though as it seems more like it is the administration itself pushing in this direction (obviously chances are there is some kind of lobby work behind it but at least currently i wouldn't know where to point fingers). The EU basically hates US big tech. Officially because "monopoly bad, mmmk?" but in reality it is more because they hate how the big pond absorbs most of their bullying capabilities and they have nothing comparable.
Age check requirements are about to drop EU wide by the end of the year (where i am over half the population hasn't even heard about any of this yet...) accompanied by an official app that is basically a precursor to the EU's digital ID (same infrastructure just with a limited scope) which is supposed to roll out by the start of next year (no idea about the public's awareness but given most don't even know about the age verification app...) and is supposed to handle identification, financial data, official documents and so on (no conspiracy nonsense here - this is publicly available information from the official sales pitch).
The whole thing is one massive pile of dogshit overripe for abuse. I guess at some point i will make a dedicated thread on this. I just didn't have the right amount of motivation yet.
From what i hear you can also add Australia to the list. Sure, all of those systems are different in this or that aspect but overall it is all going in the same direction and brushing off how all of those systems strangely came about almost at the same time as a mere coincidence would seem kind of naive.
Red tape doesn't really have to be unenforceable to be bad. Piling up red tape in front of a given activity/business/whatever will always favor big business over small/medium businesses or sole traders as the effort needed to archive compliance simply gets to be unrealistic at some point or at least drives up costs which are easier to offset at scale and all of this is on top of the dystopian surveillance/control aspect.
even in China you can access "certain sites" by using VPN, is Utah Gov. has more power than China central Gov.??
china numba one
Well, at least from what i hear (i am certainly no expert on China) VPN use is generally outlawed for private citizens over there though, which admittedly is still (as crazy as it sounds...) more reasonable than randomly putting such nonsensical policing requirements on website operators. So basically China still has more sensible censorship policies than them. Way to go Utah!
for internet control, yes, they are NO.1 in the world
so, never mind
Is this unconstitutional?
Not an issue if it’s just for soaking purposes
Do we need to prevent our servers from being used as VPN exit nodes for Utah-based traffic?
As mentioned in the article below, services like IP2Proxy can be used to detect VPN usage. It is possible that one of our servers is currently being utilized as a VPN proxy.
https://blog.ip2location.com/knowledge-base/detecting-vpn-usage-for-age-verification-compliance-with-ip2proxy/
So if I'm an operator of an adult website, and a user from Utah accesses it via a VPN/exit node/whatever, and I don't block them, as the website operator, I could be criminally charged and forced to appear in Utah? 0.o.0.o
Seems so (well, if you are outside the US chances of your home country extraditing you are basically zero, so in this case you can just relax). I guess Utah realized that their hotel and tourism industry is struggling so they are force-recruiting tourists now.
Full nonsense!!!
I doubt that would hold up. I don't think a state can make it a crime for not avoiding something that you're technologically incapable of avoiding. They might try, but it won't go anywhere. The more likely danger is that other states follow suit with equally stupid laws until privacy and anonymity is essentially banned countrywide.
Oh they are trying, the thing is, even though as we have discussed its technologically impossible to do, but what this gives is the power for the state to still sue whatever website they like and this inadvertedly puts pressure on the smaller websites (similar to the UK case actually)
The lobbying seems to be something nationwide so I do think that as Utah has now proposed this case, it will simply become part of our discourse until the nation would do this too and might even get it passed too.