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Governments across the U.S. and around the world are looking for new ways to keep minors away from inappropriate content online. While age verification is becoming a common hurdle, Utah’s SB 73 — set to go into effect later this week — goes a step further by indirectly targeting the best VPN services.
As reported by our friends at Tom’s Hardware, the state’s Online Age Verification Amendments will begin enforcement on May 6. While the bill includes a new 2% tax on adult content revenue beginning in October, the most immediate impact for users involves the aggressive new regulations on VPN access.
Once the law goes into effect, anyone physically located in Utah will be considered to be accessing a website from within the state, regardless of whether they’re using a VPN, proxy server or other means to hide their geographic location. To complicate things further, Utah will also be the first state to hold companies liable if visitors to their websites are using a VPN to bypass age verification.
Article continues belowThe new law doesn’t just discourage VPN use; it also prohibits companies that host “a substantial portion of material harmful to minors” from explaining or even encouraging Utah residents to use one to bypass age verification checks. So, for instance, an adult website won’t be able to put out a post on social media explaining how those concerned about their privacy can use a VPN to access its site anonymously.
While not an outright VPN ban, SB 73 effectively discourages VPN use across the board by limiting what websites can say about them. It creates a "guilty until proven innocent" environment for platforms: if a site can’t tell if a user is actually in Utah, its obligation to police VPNs remains murky. However, if a site allows a Utah minor through because they were using a VPN, that site is now on the hook for a lawsuit.
Age verification outlook
Whether you like it or not, age verification across the web is coming. Enough U.S. states and countries have gotten on board that it’s no longer a question of if, but when, age verification will go into effect.
For most people, this will likely involve uploading a government ID or answering a few questions before they can access a particular site. Just like how CAPTCHA protects sites from bot traffic, age verification is designed to protect minors from accessing inappropriate content online.
There’s just one really big problem, though: VPNs. While a VPN can be a legitimate tool to protect your anonymity and privacy online, they also allow you to sidestep geo-blocking, like what Utah is trying to do here. Likewise, many people depend on VPN services to securely access company files and data over an encrypted connection.
Even if Utah or any other government wanted to block VPNs outright, doing so would be incredibly difficult. VPN providers constantly add new IP addresses and, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, there’s no comprehensive blocklist. Furthermore, "residential proxies" — which make a user's traffic look like it's coming from a standard home ISP — are nearly impossible for websites to filter out.
Utah is looking at an endless game of whack-a-mole if it tries to block VPNs outright. This is why the state is shifting to a "liability trap," holding websites legally responsible when users mask their location. To avoid this risk, many sites may simply choose to block all known VPN traffic or force every visitor, regardless of where they are, to upload an ID.
We’ll see how SB 73 works in practice once it goes into effect on May 6, but for now, let’s hope other states don’t follow in Utah’s footsteps. The goal of protecting minors comes from a good place, but the rest of us are going to be caught up in the fallout.
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