Welcome everyone to this discussion about Utah’s absolutely insane new law and their fight against adult content. It is genuinely hard to take this seriously because it sounds like an absolute joke, but the state is trying to hold websites legally liable if underage users access their adult material. Whenever this issue comes up around the world, the real solution always comes down to good parenting, not turning the internet into a police state like some authoritarian regimes.
The New Law
Under Utah’s rules, users must verify their age using a credit card or ID to view adult content. The obvious flaw here is that anyone can just use a VPN, change their virtual location to another country like Mexico, and completely bypass the age check without providing any personal information.
In response, Utah is now targeting how people connect to these networks. Signed by Governor Spencer Cox, this controversial law dictates that a user is legally considered to be accessing a site from Utah if they are physically there, regardless of whether a VPN or proxy masks their IP address. It even goes so far as to prohibit websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass these age verifications.
Makes No Sense
NordVPN called out the legislation, arguing that it is an unresolvable, complex mess because it holds websites responsible for identifying users who are using tools specifically designed to be unidentifiable. While I have previously criticised NordVPN for sneaky and deceptive advertising, I have to agree with them here. The entire point of a VPN is to help make your connection more anonymous, making Utah’s demands completely absurd.
The most technically flawed part of this law is the assumption that web providers can reliably detect VPN traffic and determine a user’s true physical location. If a person in Utah uses a VPN to connect through Germany, there is no realistic way for a website provider to know their actual location. To make things even more complex, VPN services like NordVPN, Mullvad, or Proton allow users to connect to hundreds of different IP addresses worldwide, and these addresses are often dynamic rather than static. An adult website might block a specific German IP address today, but if the VPN service assigns the user a different German IP tomorrow, the block becomes useless. It is completely unreasonable to expect website operators to track and manage this constantly shifting pool of data.
Furthermore, as Luke James from Tom’s Hardware points out, while autonomous system number analysis can catch traffic coming from major data centers, it cannot identify a personal WireGuard tunnel running on a cloud VPS. An individual can easily set up their own private VPN tunnel using a personal virtual private server through standard infrastructure like AWS or Azure. Because this traffic routes through the same infrastructure as ordinary web hosting, a website provider has no way to distinguish it from legitimate, non-VPN traffic. The technical reality of how the internet functions makes enforcing this law an impossible task.
Ultimately, the only way a government could truly lock down the internet to this degree would be to implement heavy-handed censorship infrastructure similar to China’s Great Firewall or Russia’s TSPU system. To actually force compliance and monitor everyone’s location, a state would have to adopt authoritarian, mass-surveillance technology that tracks every single action citizens take online.
Western countries like the United States and the United Kingdom frequently criticize authoritarian regimes for their restrictive internet practices, yet they are implementing similar measures at home. These governments use the guise of child safety as a sickening excuse to push for mass surveillance and total digital control. Except in Utah’s case the reality is that these politicians have absolutely no idea how internet infrastructure works. Instead of relying on technical specialists for guidance, government positions are treated like political favours, where officials simply appoint their friends to cabinet positions and regular citizens are left to deal with the consequences.
Fortunately, there is active push back against this overreach. Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, filed a legal challenge that successfully delayed the enforcement of Utah’s law until September 3rd. While this specific delay only protects websites owned by that single parent company, a victory in court could potentially dismantle or heavily modify the law for everyone.
The Solution
Defeating this legislation requires direct public action. Parents need to practice responsible parenting at home rather than allowing a police state, and citizens must hold their local representatives accountable. Voters need to make their voices heard by signing petitions and telling the politicians who enforced this law that they will lose support in the next election.
More Issues
The sheer impracticality of the law becomes obvious when you consider that a new adult website can be created anywhere in the world at any time. If the state of Utah attempts to email a random adult site creator in Southeast Asia to demand they block VPN IP addresses, that operator will simply ignore the request. Even if Utah manages to block a specific URL, the site creators will just migrate the data to a new IP address or domain within hours. The law makes zero technical sense, is entirely immoral, and sets a dangerous precedent that will likely spread across the United States and Canada if citizens do not fight back.
