It's official: Utah is the U.S. state closest to banning VPNs

When Utah's Senate Bill 73 goes into force on May 6, websites subject to the state's age verification law will be legally barred from explaining how to use a VPN to get around age restrictions. They'll also be liable for enforcing age verification for any user within Utah's physical borders — regardless of their apparent virtual location.

Although these provisions appear to just be updates to the existing age verification law, they carry more far-reaching implications. For starters, forbidding businesses from even discussing VPNs on their websites feels very much like a First Amendment violation, though we'll have to wait for the inevitable court case to know for sure.

But it’s the other provision that has online freedom advocates more worried. As you may know, a VPN can be used to change your virtual location so you appear to be getting online from somewhere else. If a website grants access to an underage Utah resident who's using a VPN to connect seemingly via another state, that website could be liable for violating the law.

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This leaves impacted online businesses with two solutions — both of them bad. They could force every user to go through age verification, violating the privacy of everyone who visits the site (to say nothing of the likely impact to the site's revenue as users balk at the age gates).

Alternatively, the websites could block all VPN traffic — or try to. VPN protocols are easy to disguise as regular web traffic, so the only way to prevent their use is to block IP addresses associated with them. But VPN providers regularly add new IP addresses and start the cycle all over again.

Blocking VPN use isn't just technically difficult, either. It's considered a rights violation in most countries, and the only governments trying to do it tend to be highly restrictive of rights in general. Utah is just the farthest state along a path that's inevitable for all states with age-gate laws: The internet is amorphous enough that enforcing large-scale bans practically requires broad crackdowns on the right to privacy and free expression.

Thus far, states seem reluctant to cross the final threshold into total VPN bans. A proposal to ban all VPNs was defeated in Wisconsin due to the same concerns we discussed above. That's why the Utah law stops just short of the line. But given that it largely has the same impact, even for those outside of the state, it will be instructive to watch the lawsuits and legal challenges to the Utah legislation and similar laws — which we can count on ensuing in the weeks and months ahead.

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