Utah is attempting to cover up the failures of their age verification law by effectively banning VPNs.
In all practical sense, age verification laws are a dead on arrival concept. This was very obvious when Australia vied to be a “world first” or “world leader” in pushing these failed laws and continues to be obvious to this day. This is because it is technically impossible to enforce due not only to the fact that the technology used to enforce these laws simply don’t exist and the fact that online tools that exist today will easily circumvent such restrictions in the first place.
Sadly, the cult-like mentality of those pushing these laws are undeterred by silly little things like logic, evidence, and common sense. For them, it’s just a case of believing hard enough and it’ll all magically come true. If anything, for them, it’s just a political game and anyone coming out with evidence of any kind of where things would inevitably go with these laws just need to be accused of working for “Big Tech”. You know, shoot the messenger because nothing could possibly go wrong with that, right?
Now, I’m going to insult your intelligence by pointing out the predictably obvious ensued. The age verification laws in Australia failed in spectacular fashion. People were defeating these age gates with sharpies and pictures of golden retrievers. The technology was a security nightmare following the Discord data breach, the AgeGO scandal, and additional leaks and breaches. All of this over top of the fact that Australian teens were simply utilizing VPN technology to to get around the gates as well.
Faced with the complete and utter failure of age verification, mainstream media was forced to re-write history and pretend absolutely nothing went wrong and everything is just going swimmingly in Australia. All of this was coupled with heaps of denial even as almost everyone found ways of getting around the mass government censorship.
Naturally, armed with inventing a complete alternate reality, Europe decided to move ahead with their own age verification laws. In fact, faced with massive amounts of criticism, the European government said that they were rolling out their own app. This supposedly to address both the reliability and security concerns. This with the intention of shouting from the roof tops about how there is no longer any excuse not to adopt the age verification technology because they have a totally ready for prime time app that will fix everything. The government then proceeded to roll out the “ready for prime time” app only to have the app get hacked within mere hours of the rollout. What’s more, numerous security vulnerabilities were also discovered in the process including the extremely embarrassing fact that the credentials used were simply left unencrypted. This was the moment that age verification failed in Europe.
Nevertheless, none of this is enough to deter the die hard true believers of age verification. For them, all they have to do is invent even more tall tails about it all to cover it up. The failure in Australia? Doesn’t exist! Yup, the only issue is that teens are just having a hard time adjusting to the new reality that they have been totally gated off from social media. Really, it’s for their own good though, so we solved the issue in Australia once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL!!! The failure in Europe? What failure? Let’s just pretend that this is all part of a growing trend that it should be implemented everywhere. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Now, all that’s needed is the mainstream media to publish these lies and everyone will believe it.
Beneath all of those lies, however, there is the ongoing truth that age verification is a failure everywhere it was implemented. Lawmakers have increasingly grown desperate to plug the many many holes in these laws as well. One particularly drastic solution they’ve come up with is VPN ban laws. As we earlier reported, Utah was pushing for such bans. Apparently, they have become the first state to have these VPN ban laws go into effect. From PCGamer:
Age verification is an especially hot topic in the US right now. A California law will go into effect next year that requires operating systems to verify the user’s age at account setup and the “Parents Decide Act” may introduce similar requirements to the entire nation. There are well-documented concerns from experts about the form age verification is taking right now, but put those aside for a moment, because Utah has some ideas of its own on how to tackle all this.
Enter Senate Bill 73, the state’s Online Age Verification Amendments legislature. It goes into effect May 6, and will make Utah the first US state with age verification laws that specifically target VPN use. Websites with “a substantial portion of material harmful to minors” will be required to check users’ ages, and the site is still on the hook if users get around it with a VPN.
“An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network,” the bill reads, going on to state that affected websites also can’t give instructions on how to use a VPN.
If you’ve used a VPN before, the problem with this probably seems obvious: this software is specifically designed to obfuscate your location. In a statement shared with TechRadar, NordVPN said reliably identifying and blocking Utah-based VPN users trying to bypass age verification would be “technically impossible” and creates a “liability trap” for affected businesses.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit, criticized the law as presenting no clean way out for adult sites and potentially paving the way for a dangerous precedent. “The legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally. This would subject millions of users to invasive identity checks or blocks to their VPN use, regardless of where they actually live.”
The problems aren’t just technical ones, it’s also ones of geography. If a website is located outside of Utah (which is pretty much everyone), then it’s pretty difficult to enforce this on the websites themselves. While the report suggests that ordering websites to regulate VPN traffic is totally not a VPN, it’s really obvious that this is the intended effect. How is this going to get enforced without banning VPN traffic? It clearly doesn’t work otherwise. There is no way to know if someone accessing a website through a VPN is coming from Utah or Greece – and that’s the whole freaking point of a VPN in the first place – obfuscating your location.
The only reason why such a proposal is being made in the first place is because lawmakers know full well that age verification is easily defeated and one way to defeat it easily is through VPN services. The reality is that many users do use VPN services for legitimate purposes. Not everyone wants to be tracked in hundreds of thousands of ways across the web. So, you can’t assume a website is getting accessed through a VPN for nefarious purposes every time. What’s more, banning VPN traffic is, at best, only a Band-Aid solution to a problem that has no hope on getting resolved.
I honestly don’t know how this is even going to withstand a court challenge, either. Still, this law is in no way shape or form practical to enforce. Still, as the cult of age verification supporters grow more militant, it would be surprising if this is even the last VPN ban law to go into effect around the world.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.
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