Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

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Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

GavinAnderegg

Comments (174)

mvdwoord
I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals... they feel dystopic and can seemingly only lead to brutal restrictions on the internet. What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home? With DPI? And a government issued smartcard to use it? It comes across as if this is what some legislators are actually after... they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work and I am a bit worried they will morph the public discussion into enforcing at a lower level otherwise "the bad guys still circumvent"??
davideg
EFF has a similar article: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati...The bottom line:> if a website cannot reliably detect a VPN user's true location and the law requires it to do so for all users in a particular state, then the legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally.Clearly anyone slightly sophisticated can bypass restrictions like this. A quick search reveals https://github.com/shadowsocks. This only harms regular users who might benefit from privacy. The dystopia levels continue to rise...
bloppe
There's tension between this law and the 14th, 5th and 1st amendments.Due process doctrine from the 5th and 14th establish unconstitutional vagueness. A law cannot be so vague as to be impossible to comply with. This law requires websites to enforce a ban based on information they don't have access to. Without explain how they might possibly achieve that aim, it can be considered unconstitutionally vague.The 1st amendment requires that a law restricting free speech use the least restrictive means possible to achieve it's aim. Due to the vagueness of how to comply on a technical level, the only possible way to comply would be to require global identity verification based on Utah's standards. I don't think that would pass a least restrictive means test.
Nifty3929
VPNs are on their way toward being banned and/or heavily regulated. I imagine what will happen is a requirement for VPN providers to "know your customer" just as banks do, and for them to be able to tie a particular traffic stream back to a specific human.
nunez
So they're asking ISPs to build the Great Mormon Firewall, basically. Cool, cool cool, cool, cool.I'm more scared that there is a push to do this federally, as that will, effectively, be tantamount to establishing explicitly state-controlled media.
pbasista
What is the motivation for such a measure? In other words, which problem is it trying to solve? And how it is supposed to do so?I think that we should not carelessly invent laws that just "sound good" to some lawmakers but have no real fact checking done to support them and are not backed by science.Because, in my opinion, then there is a high risk that these "good intentions" will backfire spectacularly. While not getting even close to achieve the desired effect.
bilsbie
I really miss the 90s. Can someone make a new internet that’s like that?
kstrauser
This is the stupidest idea I’ve heard recently. Way to go, Utah.My home router has a built in VPN server. When I’m out running around, my iPhone can route traffic through my house. Pray tell, o sage Utah legislature chucklefucks, how is anyone expected to tell that I’m accessing a website from a hotel in Berlin instead of my house in California? (Which is why we used it last time: I configured my travel router to use that same VPN so we could watch American Netflix at night before bedtime when we just wanted something familiar to relax with.)Honestly, this is the new “pi equals 3” legislation. “Let’s make laws codifying technical ideas we clearly have no freaking clue about”.Again, way to go, Utah.
anon
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phendrenad2
I'm tired of fighting this stuff. The forces allied against internet freedom are just too large for us regular Hacker News nerds to deal with. What we need is a mass awakening of normal people who see the effects of internet censorship and demand a reversal. And sadly, that might not be possible until the normal people get a taste of censorship to realize they don't like it. So now I think, the sooner we go full China the sooner we can get things back to normal.
iLoveOncall
Here's the website of Utah's governor if you want to access it via a VPN: https://www.votecox.com/
homtanks
This sounds reasonable to me. It only affects websites with content harmful to children, and forces them to close an obvious loophole. Many VPN ranges are published (including Tor) and it's not difficult to find most of the rest.
nephihaha
What a coincidence that Utah is following the same pattern as Australia, the European Union, Norway and the UK, while pretending they came up with it independently.
ChrisArchitect
Related EFF coverage:Utah's New Law Targeting VPNs Goes into Effect Next Weekhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47969868
bradley13
This is happening simultaneously in many Western countries. It is clearly somehow coordinated. You don't need a tinfoil hat to see the conspiracy.Equally clearly, this is a first step to requiring identity, and ultimately government approval for your activities in the internet.Somehow, we really must reign in the political class, before we truly land in a dystopia.
righthand
> It also prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.This country is led by idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom.
FrustratedMonky
Doesn't this seem impossible?So if I have jo-blow web site.And a user uses a VPN, how am I supposed to do anything about it. And why should i?
2OEH8eoCRo0
I like this. You should have a duty to know who you are transacting with.Technically the user is liable but this often doesnt work in practice. The result is people are harmed without recourse. A liability desert forms.The platform isn't liable, the users are!Ok, who is this offending user?¯\_(ツ)_/¯
anon
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functionmouse
only the beginning
eu
is this even doable/enforceble?
antibull
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juliusceasar
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OutOfHere
People need to do their best to stop paying so much in taxes to their state governments, failing which the governments get increasingly authoritarian. The state governments clearly have run out of real problems to solve, and when they do, they then attack basic freedoms. Keeping them strongly tax-constrained keeps them lean. As it stands, these governments are representing special interests, not the people. It doesn't matter how many places or where this is happening; the logic is the same. What happens is that the tax money is a prerequisite for strong enforcement. Without an excess in tax money, there isn't going to be substantial enforcement. I am not asking anyone to break tax law; only to aggressively hunt for exceptions to your advantage.Outside of a W-2 salary for which taxes are pre-deducted, there are many ways, more applicable to businesses, also to independent contractors. Even for those with a salary, they ought to do their best to collect all the legally qualified benefits that they can. Lots of independent contractors get paid as W-2 when they could be getting paid as a corp, for which they could write off a portion of the taxes via deductibles and in various other ways. Lots of people could be ordering online at websites that don't deduct a sales tax. Using a Delaware corp for various transactions can also go a long way. Living in a geography where the property taxes are not absurdly high or rising also matters.
anon
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tekawade
I understand the need for age verification. And better way to do this is have all device way to communicate the age set by parents to websites.This is just one of the way. “The Anxious Generation”- Jonathan Haidt put it across. Rey well. It’s import at this day and age to check age online.Banning VPN is not the way.Even ChargePoint app does not work with vpn on I am baffled.