Age verification laws have become more dangerous to civilians as VPNs become increasingly targeted. Michigan is one example.
One of the obvious results of age verification laws is people increasingly turning to things like VPN technology to skirt the efforts of government internet censorship. This is by no means a theory. It has happened in the UK, Texas, Wisconsin, Australia, and, most recently, Missouri. Such an outcome was repeatedly warned by experts as an obvious next move, but lawmakers have long refused to believe in this logical outcome of all of this. Instead, lawmakers have simply chosen to continue to rely on personal beliefs that age verification laws are magical solutions to problems that exist only in their heads and chose to believe that this isn’t going to be something that happens. Spoiler alert: it happened.
Now, while lawmakers respond to this obvious outcome with a considerable amount of shock (you know, because they are idiots after all), some lawmakers are responding in probably the worst possible ways imaginable. That is, they are following up their age verification laws with additional laws to ban VPN technology altogether. Now, in a past life, such laws would be laughed out of the room. After all, using a VPN is by no means illegal and banning the use of such technology is obviously unconstitutional. The problem is, the US has increasingly become a lawless state controlled by a fascist regime where basic civil rights are little more than a suggestion. As a result, anything goes as long as Trump likes it. I mean, why else is it possible that you get stories of troops on the city streets demanding to see that your paperwork is in order these days?
As a result, this state of lawlessness has seemingly invited even more Orwellian efforts to control thought on the internet. We’ve seen this in the UK, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
It’s specifically the effort in Michigan to ban VPNs that Proton VPN is warning about. From MSN:
So, from VPNs historically enjoying bipartisan support, the fact that they can be used to bypass new age verification requirements could be enough to turn these tools into a liability. An obstacle that needs to be dealt with – quickly, once and for all. The problem is that our internet security and freedoms are also on the line.
As per the House Bill 4938, or simply “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act,” internet service providers would be forced to “monitor and block known circumvention tools.”
“The promotion or sale of circumvention tools to access prohibited material” will also be banned in the state under this law.
Fines for non-compliance are expected to be as high as $500,000.
Specifically, lawmakers define circumvention tools as “any software, hardware, or service designed to bypass internet filtering mechanisms or content restrictions, including virtual private networks (VPNs), proxy servers, and encrypted tunneling methods to evade content restrictions.”
As Banned explains, this Michigan bill de facto creates a liability for ISPs (internet service providers) that are enabling access to VPNs, regardless of whether or not they’re used to access pornography.
“This law really has such widespread implications for internet usage, completely unrelated to the purpose of the bill,” Bannen told TechRadar. “It takes an extreme approach that would have implications for all content and all internet security.”
On a practical level, if this passes, Michigan users of Proton VPN (and any other VPN service, for that matter) could presumably be blocked from accessing this security software. They will then be prevented from using a tool that millions worldwide use every day to boost their online privacy and security.
The fact that such an insane law is even being proposed in the first place shows just how bad things have gotten in the age verification debates. Lawmakers know that age verification laws have failed and are resorting to increasingly authoritarian measures to somehow make these laws work anyway. Hopefully, these extremist measures to control speech on the internet remains as just a proposal from a few crackpot politicians. Then again, this is where the age verification laws started in the first place, so who knows over the long term?
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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